Ichiko Aoba’s Luminescent Creatures is a Breathtaking, Lucid Dream

Though Japan has long known about Ichiko Aoba and her gifts for spinning beauty out of quietude, it wasn’t until 2018, when qp received a release in Western markets, that an international audience finally started to remember her name. Such an audience might not be aware that the multi-instrumental lushness of Adan no Kaze (released in the US as Windswept Adan) was comparatively maximalist to the solitary classical guitar and voice that, from 2010’s Kamisori Otome onward, demonstrated how Aoba could evince that gift with the barest of tools.

It turns out you can never truly go back home; on Luminescent Creatures, Aoba doubles down on the grandeur with a record that’s even more accessible, and perhaps even more thematically cohesive than its direct predecessor. The link is so direct, in fact, that it shares its title with the final song of Windswept Adan. Their settings are also contiguous—both are filled with portrayals of islands and oceans, hills and towers, human inhabitants and superhuman entities. But where Adan’s opener, the murky pump-organ-led “Prologue,” rolled in slow as fog, Luminescent Creatures’ “COLORATURA” gives way almost immediately to Umebayashi’s cascading keys, Junichiro Taku’s skyward flute trills and Aoba’s ethereal breathwork. The song prefaces an altogether lighter-hued, but no less absorbing album of songs inspired by the geographical splendor of the Ryukyu Archipelago south of Japan’s mainland. Adan’s forests and fog come across as claustrophobic compared to Luminescent Creatures’ open air and sky.

Throughout, Aoba works in the granular, aurally ornamenting her melodies in ways made striking from the silence that surrounds them. Take “mazamun,” named for an impish rain spirit of Aoba’s creation, and the sounds that accompany the close-mic’ed roll of her fingers on the keyboard; in the creak of the stool and the pressure on the keys, she conjures post-storm raindrops on foliage. Compare that to the way the piano on subsequent track “tower” seems to glide on air, and how, amid Aoba watching the world pass from afar, it feels fittingly isolated from reality. These tiny little touches aren’t just decoration; they are the spiritual center of the record. Like a pop-up book, they add a crucial dimension to Aoba’s otherwise gorgeous melodies.

As with Windswept Adan, Aboa counts on arranger Umebayashi to fill in her landscapes. Previously lauded for his work co-scoring the hit anime Yuri on Ice, Umebayashi once again seamlessly marries his compositional talents to Aoba’s melodicism. Besides filling “Luciférine” with its requisite flourishes, he primarily leads on the album’s more instrumental moments, like the chiming “Cochlea” and the skittering harpsichord-like pulses of “Pirsomnia.” But his orchestral muscle never steals the show from Aoba’s melodic backbone, even when the two voices seem to conjoin—it’s easy to imagine closing tracks “SONAR” and “惑星の泪 (Wakusei no Namida)” for example, as solo Aoba pieces were it not for the fragile electronic work surrounding them.

Indeed, if the record is less the product of a singular vision than of a fruitful collaboration, it’s even more fitting that Luminescent Creatures is about the fundamental immutability of human connection. She returns to the ocean, that evergreen reminder of primordial life, as an anchor. Recurrent related imagery—coral, sails, stars, tears—pervades, but the central motif remains that photonic connection, the bioluminescence of underwater creatures that cannot truly hide even in impermeable darkness. It’s a potentially powerful metaphor, in that to posit that humanity exists in light is to make its presence inescapable. It’s in the nighttime sky (“aurora”) and the deepest reaches of the sea (“Luciférine”); it’s in the glow of city windows (“tower”) and the flicker of a lighthouse (“FLAG”).

There’s an irony to the reality that many non-Japanese speakers originally discovered Ichiko Aoba specifically because of another photonic connection: the internet. Without an understanding of the language, many flock to Aoba’s work in the name of aesthetic escapism. In a way, it’s similar to how we devour the beloved Japanese literary trope isekai; it’s not a place we travel to but a placelessness we travel with, a flexible feeling we can layer over whatever scenes and scenarios call for a deeper feeling. The downside of casting pristine spells like these is the subsequent misunderstanding of music as a neutral magic, rather than a product of sweat, talent, real hands and real minds.

Aoba is clearly more interested in the antithesis of escapism, in leaning in rather than pulling away. In a record of lucid dreams, Luminescent Creatures’ earthbound outlier comes in “24° 3′ 27.0″ N, 123° 47′ 7.5″ E,” a tender coalescence of guitar, strings and voice that comes early in its runtime. The coordinates in its title point to a lighthouse on Hateruma, the southernmost island in Japanese territory. The song Ichiko Aoba sings has been sung for hundreds of years by the island’s inhabitants, translated through her vision and passed on to a growing audience who, like the audience at Showa, cannot help but hang on to every word.

Rob Moura is a Seattle-based writer and musician. He’s also a barista, in case you need to know what the restroom code is.