The life aquatic of Ichiko Aoba

Not red as in stained with the blood of hunted whales, but red as in the colour of Noctiluca scintillans, a species of bioluminescent plankton that – after nightfall and when springtime conditions are just right – produces electric flashes known as “blue tears” when disrupted as waves rush into shore. Although she never got to see this phenomenon firsthand, her imagination kept returning to all the bioluminescence that we can’t necessarily see, that goes beyond the limits of human perception.

Sometime later, while staying on the island of Okinawa in Japan’s Ryūkyū archipelago, she was reminded again of these plankton while eating translucent umibudo (sea grapes), imagining them as small, glowing lights entering her body – as luminescent creatures with their own lives and motivations. Suddenly, the beginnings of a story began to unfold. Aoba’s imagination had already been sparked by encountering the adan that grow on the nearby island of Zamami, connecting these hardy, wind-whipped trees and their strange fruits with the human condition, and from these two seeds of ideas the lush and richly detailed world of Windswept Adan was born.

Released in December 2020, Aoba’s seventh studio album charted the emotional journey of a girl exiled by her own family from one fictional island to live on another, the enchanting Adan, rumoured to trap any human who comes ashore, never allowing them to leave. There she encounters the luminescent creatures, only they do not speak, trading seashells in place of language, and all manner of marine life. Conceived as the plot and soundtrack to an imaginary film, Windswept Adan is ultimately a story not just about connecting with nature but about becoming it; of pulling back the curtain and understanding that we were nature all along. That we are not reborn as one thing, but as a part of everything.

Aoba’s new album Luminescent Creatures picks up quite literally where Windswept Adan left off. The title is borrowed from that album’s finale, in which the girl’s physical form vanishes from the island in an implied ceremony, “transformed and reborn into a variety of living things.” “I think of Luminescent Creatures as sort of like a tail of Windswept Adan,” explains Aoba, speaking to Best Fit earlier this month from a brightly lit Japanese hotel room, alongside translator Luka Uno Sandoval joining us remotely. Like a whale’s tail, there are no bones to it, no rigid structure. There is no specific plot to her continuation of the story. The girl is gone. There is only the island, the creatures, and the world beneath the waves with its “treasure chest of song.”

“It was very important to me during the process of creating this album that each and every individual could find their own sense of existence within the music,” she adds. “There’s not one particular storyline because this album is about all of us. It’s about you, it’s about me, it’s about her. And I hope that it can evolve and fit into the lives of everyone who listens.”

To more deeply understand where she is coming from, Aoba wants to take us right back to the dawn of the planet. “When the first creatures were born in the deep sea, one of the first decisions they ever made in an attempt to communicate with others was to light up,” she says. “Light became one of the first forms of communication, and I think that, even now, when any of us in this modern day and age wants to communicate with someone else, a part of us lights up. I believe that there is luminescence in so many places, in so many different forms, and we can’t necessarily see it with our eyes. I thought, if only we were able to notice that glow, everyone’s lives would be so much richer.”

Born in 1990 in the coastal city of Urayasu, home to Tokyo Disneyland, Aoba spent most of her early life growing up 300 miles to the west, in Kyoto prefecture. One of the first songs she learned to play was “Moonlight Densetsu”, the theme tune to anime series Sailor Moon, figuring out the chords on a red toy piano she’d been given and playing along as new episodes would air. But an attempt to formalise her learning lasted only two weeks before Aoba quit, preferring her own instinctive way of deciphering a song. She was an observant child, tuned in to the granular details of her surroundings and the emotional resonance of everything. Though she was often told she was too quiet, she says she never thought of herself in that way as her interior world was always full of chatter, teeming with light and magic, wonder and sound. Sometimes she’d spend hours just listening to the ambient noise of the family home: a slowly dripping tap, the creaking of a floorboard underfoot, the hum of each appliance.

Aoba’s mother, who at some point worked for Disney, was a big advocate of nurturing that interior world, in herself as well as her daughter. She also loved to sing, and many of Aoba’s memories of her childhood are of her mum the walking jukebox, singing everything from traditional Japanese folk songs to more modern pop. “A lot of music passed through the filter of my mother first, and that’s how I still remember those songs now,” she says, “almost as if they were lullabies.” Her earliest experiences of music were also shaped by her love of Studio Ghibli and classic Disney films, which she credits with instilling in her the most fundamental ideas of nature and of conservation. Her father, a craftsman involved in various environmentally minded communities in Kyoto, also played a big part in Aoba’s consciousness of the natural world and how that fed into her own private hinterland.

Outside of her interior world, though, Aoba was less sure-footed and lived with an almost constant feeling of loneliness and alienation. “Sometimes it was so hard I felt like I was going to die,” she explained to Japanese lifestyle magazine [and], thinking back on her early teenage years in one of Kyoto’s few Catholic high schools, but she says she’s grateful for the painful memories as well as the more pleasant ones. For Aoba, keeping her sense of childhood keen by continuing to revisit her memories of that time is an essential part of her creative process. In a way, she says, reliving those memories and holding them in the palm of her hand gives her access to “a toolbox with which to weave a tapestry of music and art.”

Pallett, who uses they/them pronouns, tells me they were particularly bowled over by Aoba’s “back-to-back classic albums” 0 (2013) and qp (2018), in which she began to incorporate field recordings and other ambient sounds. “I can think of no other musician who has taken the Cageian tenet that ‘all sound is music’ and applied them with loveliness as the goal and loveliness as the outcome,” they add. “An intrinsic part of the pleasure comes from the transparency of her process. It is breathtaking and humbling. Ichiko is able to create with the simplest tools and ideas what I’ve attempted, for years, to create with orchestras and studio trickery.”

Perhaps Aoba’s secret is that she has always heard the orchestration behind even her most minimal songs but kept that for herself like some kind of protection spell. With Windswept Adan, she turned to musician Taro Umebayashi to help her make those imagined instruments a reality, introducing orchestrated strings, flute, celesta, and harp, among others. The two first collaborated on the single “amuletum” and what followed with Windswept Adan was a symbiotic process in which both influenced each other almost without explanation, co-composing and arranging the entire suite.

Also involved from the beginning was photographer and art director Kodai Kobayashi, not only as a driver for Aoba on her trip to Zamami island, introducing her to the adan trees, but the entire way through the process. Just as the music influenced his imagery, so too did his imagery help to shape the plot of Windswept Adan and the songs through which it was told. “A lot was born from our interactions with one another,” Umebayashi told Japanese publication TOKION in early 2021. “It wasn’t about being stuck in your role, like ‘I’m the composer,’ ‘I’m the photographer,’ or ‘I’m the lyricist.’ Everyone put out the same amount of energy.”

Having formed a strong foundation working so closely together on Windswept Adan, Aoba says that with Luminescent Creatures, though the core dynamics never changed, the three were able to walk their own paths and travel a bit further out of their comfort zones. What surprised her most was that, even after being apart, they often found that their thoughts were almost entirely in step with one another. “We would be talking about the same things and had almost the same interpretations of certain aspects of the songs,” she explains, adding that this was particularly apparent during the very elaborate, six-month mixing process.

“Even when we hadn’t been in touch for a while, I found that Taro-san and I would essentially have the same vision regarding the songs,” she adds, which was freeing in itself as it meant that only one of them really needed to be in the room for the mixing process, “essentially voicing the opinions of both of us.” In some ways, she says, they almost understood each other better than they understood themselves, pointing to recent single “SONAR” as an example, where Umebayashi helped her to realise that the song was missing something that could only be found upon adding the gentle washes of ambient synth we hear today.

Listening to that synth, I’m reminded of the first time I held a seashell up to my ear at the beach and heard the swishing of an unseen sea, and how cosmic it sounded. I didn’t know then that what I was hearing was only my own blood rushing through my head, amplified by the shell that put all other input on mute. But that sense of being almost cocooned and finding my own nature reflected back at me is something I also get from Aoba’s music as a whole. Guatemalan cellist and composer Mabe Fratti, who will open for Aoba in Mexico City, agrees. “I see the direct connectivity of nature and landscapes with her music, and that is something that appeals to me a lot,” she tells me. “It makes me feel tranquility and a feeling that I’m kind of ascending.”

Like Pallett, Fratti marvels at the harmonic complexity of Aoba’s songs, and how she keeps the mystery alive, describing her enveloping voice as “like a silk layer on top, with melodies that float over these amazing chords with such ease.” For London-based artist Hinako Omori, who opened for Aoba at EartH Theatre two years ago, her lyrics and sound worlds go hand in hand, resonating with her closeness to and appreciation for nature. “Listening to Ichiko-san’s music feels like such a soul enriching and cleansing experience," she tells me, "like standing under a waterfall of light.” Cassandra Jenkins, who was introduced to Aoba’s music by fellow NYC musician Katie Von Schleicher, says she also feels the both the weight and the lightness of the songs. “When I started listening, I immediately sensed a tireless dedication to a musical practice that, culminating over time, results in a deep-seated presence,” she writes over email. “I think that’s why the music feels so timeless – unattached to the past, or the passage of time, facing the present with a smooth mind.”

Of course, no artist is ever truly an island, and Aoba’s work is deeply informed by research and gathering impressions from her travels. For Luminescent Creatures, she returned to the Ryūkyū archipelago to live among the people there and see for herself the ecosystems that govern many of their lives. She was often thinking about coral on these visits, believing strongly that the fate of humans and coral are, in many ways, intertwined. Over and again she went back to the same communities, listening intently to the villagers’ stories of the reefs and how they were changing. “They’d say things like, ‘Oh, this patch of coral recently died,’ or ‘A typhoon just came by and so the coral is doing really well,’” she explains. “And sometimes I would go out to the reefs myself to look at the situation.”

In Japan, coastal areas where people are intimately connected with marine ecosystems are sometimes called satoumi, meaning landscapes that have gradually evolved and been maintained by human activity and mindful use of resources. In places like Okinawa, where coastal development and industrial farming are on the rise, these historic satoumi are threatened. Together with the effects of climate change – mass coral bleaching, stronger and more damaging typhoons – the consequences for the coral, and by extension humans, are grave. For Aoba, who sees her music as being about existing alongside ideas rather than communicating them, it was enough to code her environmentalist message into the music. To say it directly, with words, would be at odds with how she wanted the album to be received: as inviting as a picture book, as universal as the sea.

Since records began, and likely long before that, the sea has had an immeasurable influence on Japanese culture, from Murasaki Shikibu’s 11th century epic The Tale of Genji to Hokusai’s ubiquitous The Great Wave off Kanagawa and beyond. Aoba says that for as long as she can remember the ocean has always been a place where she feels inspired and at home, knowing that we will all, someday, return to it. But during the creation of Windswept Adan she began to observe it in greater detail, pushing herself to dive beyond the shallow reefs she was used to and into its darker, colder depths. In the tradition of the ama-san, a centuries-old Japanese culture of women free-divers who fish for abalone, sea cucumber, and sometimes pearls, she would dive on the resources of a single breath alone, without supplemental oxygen, opening both her lungs and her mind.

During these dives, Aoba would sometimes find herself swimming alongside the whales that migrate through the archipelago, wonderstruck by both their size and song. “One of the first things I noticed when I first swam with whales is that even if you can’t physically see them, you can hear them singing and it would almost seem as if the sound was coming from inside your own body,” she recalls. “Swimming with whales helped me to realise that, in a lot of ways, the sea is the same as our bodies, and that there is a sea that lives in each of us.”

Pointedly, Aoba doesn’t mention whales once across Luminescent Creatures’ eleven songs, but they make their presence felt on the short ambient piece “Cochlea”, and more covertly on the closing “惑星の泪 (Wakusei No Namida)”. Here, what starts out as a pretty fingerpicked acoustic ballad, swirled through with the sound of wind, is suddenly transformed as the melody drops away and the frequency dials rapidly down before plunging below the range of human hearing. Physically, Aoba says that she wanted to emulate the feeling of whale song, recalling how the lower frequencies of their singing can be “so loud and so resonant that it shakes the boats on the surface of the water above.” Conceptually, what she wanted to explore was the question of how people react to certain sounds and to music. “It was really a way to go beyond the idea of just a musical album, by going beyond the literal framework of human hearing,” she explains. “And a way, I hoped, of enriching people’s imaginations.”

In shaping such thoughtful connections with care, Aoba says she finds that the creative process becomes much more playful and fun. Even when bombarded with news from the world at large or the surface mundanity of everyday life, often mentally zooming out to see the bigger picture can help. “You can just walk through life, for the most part, by doing the bare minimum, but really thinking deeply about how we live from day to day makes things much more interesting,” she says. “Up close, we see all these individual things in our lives, whether they are islands, people, thoughts, or ideas, but when you zoom out they form something like a star system.” She holds up her notebook to the camera, pointing to a doodle she’s just made of a person-constellation, then a kaleidoscope suddenly appears and she’s peering through it into camera, twisting it to make the coloured shapes inside it move and refract. It almost looks like coral, I say, and she smiles.

Later she shows me a photo on her phone, taken during the annual harvest festival of mushama on the island of Hateruma, home to Japan’s southernmost point monument. In the picture, Aoba is taking part in a procession, wearing a locally made kimono and playing a snakeskin banjo-like instrument called a sanshin. Coinciding with the lunar calendar’s three-day bon festival, in which people all over Japan honour the spirits of their ancestors, mushama is the biggest event of the year in Hateruma. During the festival, people joining the procession are divided into three separate lines, all following a local elder wearing the costume of Miruku, a god of good fortune widely worshipped by the Ryūkyūans. “There are many different costumes, and everyone taking part offers up dance and song and food to their ancestors, almost in a ceremonial way,” Aoba explains, “partly because it’s tradition, but I think another part is that they really, truly have to believe in it very deeply for the festival to have continued for so long.”

In modern Japan, other traditional festivals and ceremonies, like the izaihō ritual of Kudaka island, are being lost as participation dwindles. As an outsider, Aoba had to seek special permission to join the mushama procession, on the condition that she learned to play a folk song originating from the island centuries ago. Returning home after the festival, the song stayed lodged in her mind and she’d find herself singing and humming along to it as she worked. Eventually, at Umebayashi’s urging, part of the song ended up on on Luminescent Creatures, given the new title of “24° 03′ 27.0″ N 123° 47′ 7.5″ E”, the precise coordinates of Hateruma’s inland lighthouse.

“There’s actually five verses to the whole song,” she explains. “The first four are sort of decipherable to the average Japanese person, but the fifth is in a dialect that’s really only understandable by the Hateruma islanders.” It’s perhaps the fifth verse that she enjoys singing most, allowing her to feel the warmth of the villagers who have passed the song down from generation to generation, incorporating a little piece of themselves along the way. Of course, folk songs don’t just exist for humans; whales have them too, passing them down and adapting them in exactly the same way. “One whale might sing a certain song, whether it’s for child rearing or looking for a mate, and other whales will hear that, copy it if they like it, and it can spread across the world,” she says, beaming. “What they’ve found is that, in different locations, if they’re far apart enough, two whales might be singing the same song but they’ll be singing it ever so slightly differently.”

With all the talk of the sea, it shouldn’t be overlooked that Luminescent Creatures also has its gaze turned upwards to the skies (“aurora”, “tower”) and beyond the blue sphere of the master ecosystem we call Earth. Translated literally, 惑星の泪 means ‘tears of the stars’, and it’s on this final track that the science fiction elements of the album come to a head, in “a melody of a million light years,” as if making contact with something alien and far, far away. “M’aider,” she sings softly – the French word for ‘help me’, and the only lyric fragment not in Japanese – but whether it’s a plea from the Earth to the stars or the other way around is left for the listener to decide. In ending the album with the word はじめまして, meaning ‘hello’ (or, more literally, ‘pleased to meet you’), I want to believe that Aoba intends for the story of Adan and the luminescent creatures to continue, but she sidesteps the question with ease.

“In a lot of ways, with these songs I am giving water from the pond that resides in that world,” she says, smiling. “But in the creation of that world, and in the process of giving that water to somebody else, there is this backdrop of society, of regulations, and what’s expected of us, so to say that that world is totally pure and can be distilled and continue to exist in its own isolated way wouldn’t necessarily be correct. It’ll continue to evolve and be shaped by the societal and historical context of its creation and the way in which it’s listened to.”

Whether that’s a “Yes” or a “You’re on your own, kid,” I’m not certain, and I don’t feel the need to be. To borrow the words of Mabe Fratti, “what I feel with Ichiko’s music is a fullness,” as if she works almost paradoxically in perfect spheres, like bubbles of umibudo or an ama’s hard-won harvest of luminous pearls. Ask Aoba, and she might tell you that the true shape of her gift resembles that of a raindrop. “I think the art of creation, and art in any of its forms, is almost like rain falling on the ground, and that everything we carry with us – whether that’s our doubts or fears – they all become clouds, and in those clouds is where artists and people who can express themselves reside,” she says.

“When I am up in those clouds, I think about what kind of rain I want to give to the Earth, because that’s what my music is really about: giving back to the Earth. And it’s not necessarily something that just artists can do, but something that anyone can do if they feel like it.” She holds up another doodle to the camera, this time of the planet showered with rain-song and a shape to the right that looks, at first glance, strange. “It’s an IV drip,” she explains, laughing. “I drew that first but it seemed a little dark, so I added the raindrops to make it a little bit lighter, a little bit cuter."