In the absence of light, it is easy to forget its fleeting nature. But, if you shut your eyes tight enough, you might catch a hazy glimmer, a day burned on the inside of your eyelids. In this darkness, Japanese musician Ichiko Aoba sees an ocean, teetering between the imminence of reality and the surrealism of a dream. Here, she has a choice: to be swallowed by its vast depths and relentless current, or to be lulled by the transience of it all and the beauty of mortality.

“I never really thought of the music as belonging to me,” Ichiko tells me when I ask her about her new full-length record, Luminescent Creatures. In the same way where we cannot truly own a belief or a feeling, Ichiko directs us to an evergreen ecosystem of flora, sea foam, and the serenity of the natural world in which her listeners can live. Rather than an escape, music is connection as it transcends language and, for Ichiko, sustains her fantasies

Borne from where her 2020 LP Windswept Adan reaches its end (both figuratively but also literally, as the last track shares the name of the new project), Luminescent Creatures delves into minutiae of her densely lush meanderings, where the littlest of hum can carry the heaviest of weight. We hear gentle flutes and fluttering keys traverse in and through as if they’ve traveled far to whisper in your ear. Sometimes only her voice lays bare against minimal strings (“FLAG”), and other times you can hear her molding, stretching, and blending (“Luciférine”), or even mimicking and intertwining with the sounds she’s placed around it (“pirsomnia”).

There is this incandescence to Ichiko’s musings that is fortifying yet softening, only glowing bright enough to make itself known, but not enough to be vain. She describes, “When I’m diving in the ocean and going fairly deep and sort of towards the shore, I’ll see very tiny creatures like plankton or jellyfish that are emitting a seven-colored light. They’re sort of blinking. I really just think about how they and other life forms make the decision to start shining in the darkness when they realize they are alone. That first decision to shine is in a lot of ways the origin of almost all life’s actions and feelings.”

Much like the tiny plants and underwater organisms that are brave enough to glow with the help of bioluminescence, the synapses in our brains fire electrical signals from one neuron to another when we think or feel or breathe. In this way, our thoughts and emotions can be seen as our own form of bioluminescence, where every moment or insignificant change seems to count for something, and where communication is sewn into every chemical reaction.

If music has its own lexicon, what is Ichiko Aoba trying to say? And to whom is she speaking? Currently celebrating the 15th anniversary of her debut and approaching her five-month international tour, she explains: “There are people at the very back of the room alone, maybe leaning against the wall. I want to make sure that my music reaches them. Obviously the people at the front are important, but I feel that I’ve always been sort of a wallflower and I want to make sure that my music reaches them as well.” Maybe it’s less about what she means to say, and more that she’s choosing to say it and has the ability to do so.

In Japan (where whaling is still lawful), Ichiko remembers when a fisherman guided her hand through the spout of a whale until she finally reached its vocal cords. She recounts, “I really just felt how amazing it is to be able to sing and how in a lot of ways, it’s a miracle.” She asks if I’ve ever watched Dragon Ball Z, saying, “In Japan, there’s a real concept of living energy. In a literal sense it could be your hands or your vocal chords that are actually reverberating and causing the sound to come out of your mouth, but really that’s just a tool and the origin of music itself. It’s sort of not bound to one part of your body, it’s more like Ki.” If we are all connected by these intangible internal moorings, as Ichiko’s insights suggest, then it shouldn’t be too hard to find each other in the dark.

Photographed by Yuichiro Noda

Styled by Hirotaka Aoki 

Written and Produced by Bree Castillo

Hair and Makeup: Katsuyoshi Kojima