Latest news with #Aoba
Sydney Morning Herald
25-04-2025
- Entertainment
- Sydney Morning Herald
Dozing off at a gig? For this cult musician, it's a compliment
Listening to Luminescent Creatures, the newest album from Japanese folk musician Ichiko Aoba, I've lost count of the times I've missed my bus stop while ensconced in its undulating waves, a primordial calm that's overwhelming. I could eat poisonous fungi and my heartbeat wouldn't plunge to the lazy rhythm it does by the end of Mazamun, a song so gently evocative that you'd swear you're on a creaky boat being lapped by the tides and not the 461X plodding down Parramatta Road. Aoba, 35, giggles at this response to her music; 15 years and 10 albums deep into a career that's drawn cultish devotion, she's used to it. At gigs, seated on a Persian rug, enveloped in the warm glow of a lamp – its light bulb always orange, she says, 'like the light bulbs they have on a night train' – she'll glance across audiences and feel a collective exhale, eyes drowsy, oftentimes completely closed. 'It doesn't offend me at all,' Aoba says, 'I actually prefer when people are very relaxed when they listen to my music. Regardless of how big the venue is, I want it to feel as though the audience has been invited into my room, so they can really relax and enjoy the music.' It's a vibe reflected in Aoba's mode of recording, too. She's said that to write and record, she needs to be serene to the point of sleep. 'To be too hyper-focused is detrimental to my music-making process, especially because a lot of my songs are inspired by dreams,' she says. 'To get as close to that dream-like state is important to me, in the studio but also when I'm performing on stage. It just helps me perform better.' Dreams are central to her creative process. 'It's important to me to not let the dreams I have end in the dream world, but rather bring them into the real world and live with them for a while. I'll wake up and make notes from my dream and then I'll just relive that story, add more details as I remember them. From there, I'll find lyrics and a melody and chords and a harmony; that is how I make music.' Naturally, a conversation with Aoba is just as hazy, if for a completely different reason. I don't speak Japanese and she doesn't speak English, meaning we're caught in an overlapping three-way swirl aided by her translator, Luka Sandoval. When we speak, Aoba's in a hotel room in Utrecht in the Netherlands, amid a European tour. Wearing a beige knit sweater, her face framed by a blunt fringe, she's as demure as you'd imagine but expressive in her answers, her gesturing hands looking to cut through the language barrier. It might make for a stilted interview, but the language barrier hasn't stopped Western audiences from embracing Aoba's work. Her first album, Kamisori Otome released in 2010, introduced Aoba's intricate guitar-work and ethereal vocals, but it was her fourth album, 2013's 0 – produced by Zak, known for his work with influential Japanese dub band Fishmans – that expanded Aoba's sound, incorporating the immersive field recordings that now typify her work. 'That was really the start of a big shift,' Aoba says. 'At the time I was working a lot in theatre, both doing the music and acting on stage, and that widened my worldview from being very sparse and just making music on my own to looking at the bigger picture.' The bigger picture reached its apex with 2020's Windswept Adan, a lush concept album that made Aoba a global star. Released in the throes of the pandemic, listeners found an escapist salve in its grand ambition, songs like Parfum d'etoiles, Kirinaki Shima and Sagu Palm's Song that blended chamber pop, '60s folk, Erik Satie and nature recordings into full worlds you wanted to live in. Five years on, Aoba has described Luminescent Creatures as a spiritual sequel to Windswept Adan, its songs inspired by the same trip that spawned Adan, where she followed the migration of whales from northern Japan to the Ryukyu Islands off Okinawa. With its maximalist harmonies, chimes and woodwinds, electronic washes that bring to life underwater enchantment and Aoba's ever-present Disney and Studio Ghibli influences, opener Coloratura expands on its predecessor's ambitions. Each song started with a specific image, she says, and for Coloratura it was 'a very weathered pirate ship, carrying ghosts, going into a raging storm and being swept up by the waves and finding it's way underwater'. Mazamun was inspired by its namesake, a friendly imp said to live on Japan's southernmost island. 'The creature is feared by the people on the island, but one found its way to a certain house and refused to move on, so when I heard about that I wanted to become its friend,' says Aoba. There were also influences more unlikely than sociable imps. James Cameron's unending eco-parable, Avatar, for example. 'I watched Avatar many, many times during the making of this,' Aoba laughs. It's an understandable meeting of two artists entranced by the wonders, and despairing at the destruction, of the deep. Would she ever want to explore the Mariana Trench, like Cameron? 'Yes, I would love to,' says Aoba. As a non-swimmer, I fear the ocean. It's clear Aoba does not. 'No,' she says, 'because if I was able to choose the matter of my own death, I would like to die on the ocean floor and become nutrients for the creatures in that ecosystem. Dying in the sea isn't necessarily something that scares me.' Dying on stage isn't a problem either. Across YouTube comments and Reddit threads, fans describe Aoba's gigs as religious experiences. While she grew up in a Buddhist family and attended Catholic school – 'the act of putting your hands together to pray is something that's common to both Buddhism and Catholicism; I still remember that as a very profound thing,' she says – Aoba is reluctant to define anyone's experience at her upcoming shows at Vivid in Sydney (she's already sold out three nights at the Opera House) and Rising in Melbourne. 'I think of my music as a train station or an expansive plaza, rather than something anyone owns,' she says. 'During a show, I'm just the caretaker of that place. It's a place where people can come in their various forms, feel something, and leave.' And, funnily enough for an artist whose work is so defined by the hypnagogic shadows of slumber, Aoba has one thing she's most looking forward to experiencing on our shores. 'Good coffee,' she laughs.
The Age
25-04-2025
- Entertainment
- The Age
Dozing off at a gig? For this cult musician, it's a compliment
Listening to Luminescent Creatures, the newest album from Japanese folk musician Ichiko Aoba, I've lost count of the times I've missed my bus stop while ensconced in its undulating waves, a primordial calm that's overwhelming. I could eat poisonous fungi and my heartbeat wouldn't plunge to the lazy rhythm it does by the end of Mazamun, a song so gently evocative that you'd swear you're on a creaky boat being lapped by the tides and not the 461X plodding down Parramatta Road. Aoba, 35, giggles at this response to her music; 15 years and 10 albums deep into a career that's drawn cultish devotion, she's used to it. At gigs, seated on a Persian rug, enveloped in the warm glow of a lamp – its light bulb always orange, she says, 'like the light bulbs they have on a night train' – she'll glance across audiences and feel a collective exhale, eyes drowsy, oftentimes completely closed. 'It doesn't offend me at all,' Aoba says, 'I actually prefer when people are very relaxed when they listen to my music. Regardless of how big the venue is, I want it to feel as though the audience has been invited into my room, so they can really relax and enjoy the music.' It's a vibe reflected in Aoba's mode of recording, too. She's said that to write and record, she needs to be serene to the point of sleep. 'To be too hyper-focused is detrimental to my music-making process, especially because a lot of my songs are inspired by dreams,' she says. 'To get as close to that dream-like state is important to me, in the studio but also when I'm performing on stage. It just helps me perform better.' Dreams are central to her creative process. 'It's important to me to not let the dreams I have end in the dream world, but rather bring them into the real world and live with them for a while. I'll wake up and make notes from my dream and then I'll just relive that story, add more details as I remember them. From there, I'll find lyrics and a melody and chords and a harmony; that is how I make music.' Naturally, a conversation with Aoba is just as hazy, if for a completely different reason. I don't speak Japanese and she doesn't speak English, meaning we're caught in an overlapping three-way swirl aided by her translator, Luka Sandoval. When we speak, Aoba's in a hotel room in Utrecht in the Netherlands, amid a European tour. Wearing a beige knit sweater, her face framed by a blunt fringe, she's as demure as you'd imagine but expressive in her answers, her gesturing hands looking to cut through the language barrier. It might make for a stilted interview, but the language barrier hasn't stopped Western audiences from embracing Aoba's work. Her first album, Kamisori Otome released in 2010, introduced Aoba's intricate guitar-work and ethereal vocals, but it was her fourth album, 2013's 0 – produced by Zak, known for his work with influential Japanese dub band Fishmans – that expanded Aoba's sound, incorporating the immersive field recordings that now typify her work. 'That was really the start of a big shift,' Aoba says. 'At the time I was working a lot in theatre, both doing the music and acting on stage, and that widened my worldview from being very sparse and just making music on my own to looking at the bigger picture.' The bigger picture reached its apex with 2020's Windswept Adan, a lush concept album that made Aoba a global star. Released in the throes of the pandemic, listeners found an escapist salve in its grand ambition, songs like Parfum d'etoiles, Kirinaki Shima and Sagu Palm's Song that blended chamber pop, '60s folk, Erik Satie and nature recordings into full worlds you wanted to live in. Five years on, Aoba has described Luminescent Creatures as a spiritual sequel to Windswept Adan, its songs inspired by the same trip that spawned Adan, where she followed the migration of whales from northern Japan to the Ryukyu Islands off Okinawa. With its maximalist harmonies, chimes and woodwinds, electronic washes that bring to life underwater enchantment and Aoba's ever-present Disney and Studio Ghibli influences, opener Coloratura expands on its predecessor's ambitions. Each song started with a specific image, she says, and for Coloratura it was 'a very weathered pirate ship, carrying ghosts, going into a raging storm and being swept up by the waves and finding it's way underwater'. Mazamun was inspired by its namesake, a friendly imp said to live on Japan's southernmost island. 'The creature is feared by the people on the island, but one found its way to a certain house and refused to move on, so when I heard about that I wanted to become its friend,' says Aoba. There were also influences more unlikely than sociable imps. James Cameron's unending eco-parable, Avatar, for example. 'I watched Avatar many, many times during the making of this,' Aoba laughs. It's an understandable meeting of two artists entranced by the wonders, and despairing at the destruction, of the deep. Would she ever want to explore the Mariana Trench, like Cameron? 'Yes, I would love to,' says Aoba. As a non-swimmer, I fear the ocean. It's clear Aoba does not. 'No,' she says, 'because if I was able to choose the matter of my own death, I would like to die on the ocean floor and become nutrients for the creatures in that ecosystem. Dying in the sea isn't necessarily something that scares me.' Dying on stage isn't a problem either. Across YouTube comments and Reddit threads, fans describe Aoba's gigs as religious experiences. While she grew up in a Buddhist family and attended Catholic school – 'the act of putting your hands together to pray is something that's common to both Buddhism and Catholicism; I still remember that as a very profound thing,' she says – Aoba is reluctant to define anyone's experience at her upcoming shows at Vivid in Sydney (she's already sold out three nights at the Opera House) and Rising in Melbourne. 'I think of my music as a train station or an expansive plaza, rather than something anyone owns,' she says. 'During a show, I'm just the caretaker of that place. It's a place where people can come in their various forms, feel something, and leave.' And, funnily enough for an artist whose work is so defined by the hypnagogic shadows of slumber, Aoba has one thing she's most looking forward to experiencing on our shores. 'Good coffee,' she laughs.
The Guardian
28-02-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Ichiko Aoba: Luminescent Creatures review – nurturing music for bleak times
In a recent interview with the Guardian, Kyoto-raised Ichiko Aoba stated that she saw herself less as a conventional musician and more like a conduit of textures and atmospheres: 'I just love sound.' Across the immersive, celestial landscape of the hugely prolific Aoba's eighth studio album (she has also released numerous live records, soundtracks and more), it's this enveloping quality that is its quiet power. Though there have been quote-unquote 'singles' released in its run-up – the hypnotic, acoustic lullaby of Flag, or the rolling pianos and rippling harps of Luciférine – Luminescent Creatures is an album to fall into; prescription-worthy aural blood pressure medication against a frenetic world. Inspired by field research into Japan's Ryukyu islands and Aoba's resultant meditations on the vast powers of the ocean, there is a tactile, organic beauty to Coloratura's twisting flutes and twinkling bells, or the underwater soundscape of instrumental interlude Cochlea. Though delicate and gentle – laced throughout with Aoba's featherlight voice – there's nothing cutesy about Luminescent Creatures. Soothing as a sound bath, yet powerful in its world-building, Aoba's continued ascent to stardom might seem unlikely, yet this is nurturing music for bleak times.
The Guardian
11-02-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
‘Fans say my concerts are safe spaces where they can forgive': the cult of Ichiko Aoba
When Ichiko Aoba stood up to perform at London's St Martin-in-the-Fields in September 2024, most people couldn't actually see the Japanese singer at first. The Georgian parish church has no stage, just a postage stamp of a red platform. And Aoba is not that tall. 'I was a bit nervous,' she says. 'Venue staff had told me it would be difficult for people to see, so I kept thinking about how I might massage people, loosen them up.' Aoba, 35, is speaking over video call from Tokyo. Her vibe in conversation is much the same as on stage: quiet but not shy, thoughtful, funny and direct. At St Martin's, she walked down the aisle, guitar in hand, sat down on the flagstone floor, big white skirts billowing up like powdery snow, and started to sing, unamplified. The audience hushed. Aoba said, 'Come closer', and everyone who could did. Since her 2010 debut, Kamisori Otome (Razorblade Girl), Aoba's quietly astonishing music has earned her a horde of devoted fans. She's an accomplished guitarist with a voice like a wind chime and a similarly airborne way with a melody. She sells out big venues immediately, and has been sought out by Japan's musical statesmen Ryuichi Sakamoto, Cornelius and Haruomi Hosono. And yet she says: 'I don't really think of myself as a musician. I just love sound. Sometimes I'm still surprised when I'm described as an artist.' She has an artist's CV by any measure: eight studio albums, eight live albums, a contribution to the soundtrack of the 2017 Ghost in the Shell. Yet Aoba says with a smile: 'If I hold being a musician as my baseline, it feels constricting. I rather want to hold on to having fun, feeling surprised. To link those together' – she joins her fingers – 'is to live a happy life.' This month, she releases her ninth album, Luminescent Creatures. To guitar, strings, chimes and keyboards, she sings about scattered light and things that glow in the dark; the aurora, a tower, a flag. In April, she will perform the album in full at the Barbican in London. Aoba was born in Urayasu, not far from Tokyo Disneyland, and raised near Kyoto. At school she variously sang in a choir, played clarinet in a brass band and drummed in a light music club. But after meeting the Japanese eight-string guitarist Anmi Yamada, with his singular, freewheeling songwriting, she took flight. She would learn his songs then have masterclasses with him over the phone. These days, to record her music, she says she needs to be so relaxed she's almost asleep. How on earth does she achieve that? 'I have to trust the moment,' she says. 'If I'm focused on this being my song, or that person being in the audience, or the light being too bright, or the sound feeding back when I play' – she does a neat bit of air guitar – 'it doesn't work. But if I just let go' – she shakes both hands in the air – 'and truly believe that the music will be my protection, I can reach a state that is almost like meditation.' It's a pretty accurate description of her audiences, too. She nods. 'When people write to me, they'll say they had a great time at a concert but also that, on a deeper level, they found a space where they felt safe, or where they found they could forgive.' She shows me a pile of decorated envelopes that she fans out in front of her then stacks under her head like a pillow: 'These make me so happy. I keep them by my bedside.' Aoba loves ancient Japanese and onomatopoeia. She wonders about what plants remember. She has visions of landscapes that she has never visited and she is drawn to the idea of sound as a means of wayfinding: whale song, sonar, echolocation. When I mention Daniel Kish, the blind runner who listens his way through the forest at speed, she beams and claps. 'Sometimes,' she says, 'during a gig, I'll close my eyes just to see how long I can play before I make a mistake. Often I think of making an album as like talking to a friend, telling them about whatever interesting thing has happened that day.' When Aoba launched her official fan community on Patreon, she called it Atóllba, after 'atoll' because she imagines it to be just that: a magical island, an iridescent safe space, in which like-minded people can gather. Her critically acclaimed 2020 album, Windswept Adan, was billed 'the soundtrack to a fictional movie'. Is Luminescent Creatures also insular, a world of it own? 'This time, instead of a story, it's like a dictionary,' she says, 'with each track a seed I'm planting.' Google the title for the second song, 24° 3′ 27.0″ N, 123° 47′ 7.5″ E, and you realise it's the coordinates for a lighthouse in the sea at the very edge of Japanese waters. 'I hoped that some people might find the island,' she says. 'But mostly, I hope that the album itself is a lighthouse of sorts.' Luminescent Creatures is out on 28 February
