Review Summary: 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.
Yet in the midst of all this Big Nameification and focus on how Aoba fits the needs of her apparently universal listenership, it has also never been easier to overlook the profound depth of her connection to nature. Look past the superficial comparisons so often made with Studio Ghibli over pastoral bliss, or the
mori gyaru aesthetics so endearingly conspicuous within her fanbase, and the environmental fixations behind her work have only become more pronounced as time has passed. Her fixation on the Ryukyu islands (the southern Japanese archipelago including Okinawa) has been in the spotlight since
Windswept Adan, itself the soundtrack to a fictional island from this chain, but her latest album
Luminescent Creatures goes one step further. Inspired by long sojourns and ocean diving on the tiny coral island of Hateruma, Aoba conceived this record as a means of celebrating the connection – the
oneness – between humanity and the natural world, for her an inviolable fact of existence, for many of us a half-forgotten dream.
However distant a prospect Aoba's abandonment of the modern world and intimate communion with the waves and wind may be,
Luminescent Creatures frames these escapes as an entirely desirable prospect, courtesy of an aesthetic journey that operates alongside of its ontological brief (albeit one that demands a quiet heart and sensitivity to one's listening environment). It comes packed with Aoba's most gauzy, whisper-thin material to date, and the mileage she ekes from it is in part a reflection of how far she and orchestrator/co-composer Taro Umebayashi have refined their palette since
Windswept Adan. Here, Umebayashi's arrangements have been pared down and integrated far more evenly with Aoba's zen musings than the bifocal emphasis that album placed on the two;
Luminescent Creatures's oeuvre never strays anything like as far into chamber shrapnel as its predecessor (its second quarter in particular), and its pacing and sequencing are a good deal steadier as such.
If anything, the album's cohesion is its own obstacle: the bulk of its tracks are so delicate and succinct that its economical runtime plays less as a single, accessible entity and much more as a frictionless slice of ocean that extends unbroken beyond its 35-minute confines and only begins to reveal its true scope across umpteen, potentially limitless repeats (cuing another playthrough in the hope of catching something you missed on your latest listen is borderline effortless with this one). On first inspection, everything about this album seems purpose-crafted to indulge a breezy listen, but in contrast to the compact keynote tracks of
Windswept Adan – and, really, anything else Aoba has made bar the dour reverie of
Mahoroboshiya – it's destined to flow through the fingers of anyone attempting to grasp it for gratification, reserving its full appeal for those content to treat it as the pool of repose it ultimately is.
There are minor exceptions here – the wondrous flourishes of opener "COLORATURA", the lilting inflections Aoba rides on "Luciférine", the aching nostalgia of the centrepiece "FLAG" (for my money, the one true Aoba classic here in every sense of the word) – but you'll be hard-pressed to find a record so full of subtle details that puts so little emphasis on the spectacle of individual moments, that drifts so freely within itself. The sole immersion-breaker is the electric piano-driven "SONAR", an artificial misstep in an otherwise immaculately organic palette (especially following the electronics that underpin "pirsomnia", whose gorgeous mesh of tones opens the door to all manner of possible future experiments). Beyond this,
Luminescent Creatures is nothing if not steeped in its own ecosystem.
In delving into one timeless question (the possibility of a true reunion between humanity and nature), Aoba inadvertently broaches another: whether it's valid to impose requirements of hookiness or structural definition on music so graceful, so pure that its beauty is practically autonomous. Show as much as a sliver of doubt either way, and
Luminescent Creatures will slip right past your standpoint — and it's on you whether that leaves it frustratingly intangible, or a precious window of escape. However elusive I find this record at points, it's simply too blissed a cleanse to pass up.
