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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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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