Follow the coordinates in the title of the spellbinding second cut on Ichiko Aoba’s pristine new album — “24° 3′ 27.0″ N, 123° 47′ 7.5″ E” — and you’ll wind up at a lighthouse on the southernmost inhabited island of Japan.
“A lighthouse, by its nature, sort of blinks intermittently,” the 35-year-old musician and vocalist from Kyoto tells Boulder Weekly via translator on a recent video call. “It lights up and says to somebody: ‘There is land here, there is life here, there’s people here.’”
Hateruma Island, a sparsely populated dot in the Yaeyama District of Okinawa where she wrote her eighth LP, Luminescent Creatures, wasn’t the only place where Aoba found signs of life. It was also teeming under the sea, which she had explored during regular diving expeditions for more than a decade, and in the traditions of the people back on shore.
“It's a place where things that seem almost like illusions or myths are actually fairly commonplace and apparent in everyday life,” she says. “People can see these things that others, people like myself or maybe you, wouldn't be able to see.”
Among these myths is the legend of the “mazamun,” sharing its name with the record’s sublime third track, which roughly translates to monster in the local dialect. Not everyone can see these spectral beasts, according to Aoba, but their presence is felt all the same.
“In Okinawa, there are exorcists, if you will, who drive these ‘monsters’ out when they appear or start to inhabit a certain area,” she explains. “But there are some people on Hateruma who don't think of these creatures as pests. They think of them as friends.”
Aoba says she would often feel this uncanny presence in a certain location like clockwork during her extended stay on the island. She shared this recurring, peculiar feeling with a trusted local, who offered a supernatural explanation: mazamun.
“As the days went on, I found out it was one they had tried to exterminate, but it refused to leave,” she says. “Because it had been there so long, someone said they were a friend of the mazamun. When I discussed my mental image of what I thought the creature might look like, that person coincidentally, or maybe not coincidentally, had the exact same image in their head.”
‘The most sensitive parts of my soul’
So it goes in the gossamer world of Luminescent Creatures, a Miyazaki-like universe where magic breathes in crystalline blooms of piano, strings and classical guitar shimmering like jellyfish and sea stars across the record’s 35-minute runtime. But you don’t need to speak Japanese, or the self-invented language Aoba sometimes sneaks into her compositions, to be moved by the wide-eyed wonder permeating her finely textured ambient folk songs.
“I try my best to access the most sensitive parts of my soul, the sort of places that really hurt to prod at,” she says. “Getting so deep in that part of your psyche, which a lot of times you don't want to explore, allows me to sort of go over any barriers people might put up between themselves and connect with listeners across the world.”
Much of Aoba’s ability to cross cultural divides comes from the distinctly human timbre of her otherworldly music. In the fluttering strings of opener "COLORATURA," or the fingerpicked nylon guitar of “aurora,” you hear not only each aching note, but also the delicate plunk of the fingers behind them.
Swelling with auxiliary instruments like flute and harp, the record’s handmade charm builds on the momentum of 2020’s Windswept Adan, Aoba’s breakthrough concept album she describes as “a soundtrack to a fictional film.” Picking up where she left off half a decade ago, Luminescent Creatures offers something akin to a sequel.
“There is obviously a deep connection in a very literal sense. The last song on the previous album is where we got the name for this one,” she says. “But on the more thematic, conceptual side: The last album was really about presenting the story, and it was sort of limited in scope. This new album is more about providing the fragments for listeners to build a story of their own.”
‘Letting it flow’
Aoba’s penchant for closeness creates the feeling of a one-on-one relationship between herself and the listener. But the final product is a collaborative effort, leaning on arranger Taro Umebayashi and creative director Kodai Kobayashi to help bring the artist’s inner world to life.
“We spent a lot of time just talking, whether that was discussion of the music, or just smaller stuff, like: ‘Hey, how are you today?’ We just got to know each other on a very deep level,” she says. “Spending months, years, sharing the minutiae of daily life got us to the point where we trusted each other so deeply that we could give honest feedback. It stopped really mattering who had composed the song, who had done what. We almost melded together.”
Much like her meditative visits to the isolated archipelago where Luminescent Creatures first began to take root, today Aoba finds herself operating from a place of creative freedom: patiently listening for the friendly monsters who may reveal themselves to her. As the globetrotting artist embarks upon a 35-city world tour — bringing her to Colorado for the first time with a May 1 performance at Denver’s Paramount Theatre — she is grateful to be guided only by her visions, and for the time it takes to see their true shape.
“I’ve come to realize music isn’t something you can rush,” she says. “It’s really about letting it come to you — and when it comes, being able to give yourself up to it, and letting it flow through you.”
ON THE BILL: Ichiko Aoba. 8 p.m. Thursday, May 1, Paramount Theatre, 1621 Glenarm Plaza, Denver. $55+