Album Review: Luminescent Creatures by Ichiko Aoba

In Jeff Vandermeer's Southern Reach novels, characters navigate an unchartered ecosystem that assimilates, regurgitates and realigns personal geographies. Like Vandermeer's series, Ichiko Aoba's Luminescent Creatures contains a lighthouse, the coordinates of which - 24° 03' 27.0" N, 123° 47' 7.5" E - provide the name for a short rendition of a folk tune belonging to the people of Japan's southernmost point, Hateruma island. Through this - also akin to Vandermeer's books - Aoba traverses the idea that stories, traditions and music can be absorbed and carried through environmental and biological connections over time via the land and nature.

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Asleep in the arms of Mother Nature: intimate communion or a timely nap? Once a cult mainstay whose international tours could be mapped across sticky pub floors, now an international icon whose latest work gets reviewed a week in advance by the Financial Times, Ichiko Aoba and the intimate retreat of her distinctive folk style have become a valued source of peace for a troubled world, recognised far beyond the shores of her native Japan. The upswing in her career has been a delight to observe in the years following her 2020 breakthrough Windswept Adan: beyond the simple fact of her well-deserved success, the purity and sincerity of her craft have shown uncommon resilience to the cynicism so easily attached to internet-disseminated household names, all the while straddling generational boundaries with a breadth many artists of her profile can only dream of. In an age where content and vogue have never seemed cheaper, hers is a rare appeal that is impossible to take for granted.

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2020's monumental 'Windswept Adan' was really the album on which Japanese folk singer Ichiko Aoba crystallised a vision she had been working on for the best part of a decade. With the same kind of pastoral folk songs at its core that had defined her career to that point, truly luscious arrangements elevated Aoba's music from from the pleasant to the boundless and sublime. With her music, and also her Japanese-language lyrics, Aoba conjured a fully realised world far more fantastical, painterly, and beholden to nature than the very real one she inhabited.

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