When she starts singing, the crowd falls into complete silence

MUSIC
Ichiko Aoba | Luminescent Creatures Tour ★★★★
Forum Melbourne, May 27

Ichiko Aoba walks onto the blue-lit stage clutching her classical guitar and is met with rapturous applause and cheers. “Hello everyone” she sings sweetly. “If you see tired people, say hi hi.” Despite her soft demeanour, she has a commanding presence and the crowd fall into complete silence when she starts singing.

Ichiko Aoba performs at the Forum Theatre on May 27, 2025.Credit: Martin Philbey

Aoba is currently touring to promote her latest album, Luminescent Creatures, released in February through her label Hermine. The 35-year-old Japanese folk singer and songwriter will be performing later this week at the Sydney Opera House as part of Vivid Live.

Since releasing her first album Razorblade Girl in 2010, she’s produced eight studio albums and eight live albums and has collaborated with the late Ryuichi Sakamoto, as well as Cornelius for a track on Ghost in the Shell: Arise.

Aoba’s enthusiasm for Disney and Studio Ghibli soundtracks shines through in her live keyboard and guitar arrangements. Her sound is like a cinematic dreamscape, plunging audiences towards the glowing deep-sea critters that inspired her latest album’s title and sonic themes.

She performs her set solo, playing only a guitar and a keyboard. During Wakusei No Namida, she guides us through her melancholy stream of consciousness with soothing vocals and silky strumming. Mazamun, about an imp from distant lands, is performed on keyboard with distorted sounds woven in, like the original recording.

Ichiko Aoba is a captivating performer.Credit: Martin Philbey

But much of Aoba’s set is about stillness and complete immersion. When she plays, the crowd enters pin-drop silence. Even the slightest disruption, such as the crunch of a can or the thud of a footstep, is met with a dirty glance.

Singing in Japanese, she conveys sentiments through the crystal high notes and whispery low notes, luring the crowd in like a siren. She interacts with the audience in English and Japanese, making remarks like “I have many friends, imaginary friends” or “always coffee, coffee, coffee, coffee”, a joke about Melbourne culture which elicits a laugh.

The stage is minimalist, adorned with a side table laden with a vase of flowers, a globe and an array of lamps. Occasionally there’ll be a lighting effect, like a spotlight that emulates the moon or a tortoise shell speckled design projected onto the back curtain.

The crowd is tentative about applauding, waiting for a conclusive indication that she’s finished before clapping between tracks. Hardly anyone raises their phone to record, and when they do, she kindly asks them to stop.

The performance goes for just under two hours, including the encore. A long time to be standing, even for the most dedicated fan. A couple of audience members even faint. Seating would have ensured a comfortable concert experience and suited the intimate atmosphere.

A captivating performance, where you surrender to Aoba’s fantasy and detach from the chaos of the outside world.
Reviewed by Vyshnavee Wijekumar

MUSIC
Floodlights ★★★
Forum Melbourne, May 24

Smoke, an immense cage of light, an eager rush onto one of Melbourne’s most storied stages, and a hometown heroes’ welcome that swells the room. Floodlights’ night is a triumph already. Alive (I Want To Feel) is heralded by the lone trumpet of Sarah Hellyer: the bugler in the face of a gathering storm. And alive we feel.

Melbourne rock band Floodlights at the Forum on Saturday night.Credit: Martin Philbey

Floodlights are no pop band; no hits or Hottest 100 contenders, though their second album, Painting of My Time, was shortlisted for the 2023 Australian Music Prize. What tonight’s packed room reflects is more unusual: a serious following for serious music, with a gritty, localised aesthetic that more tenderly echoes Midnight Oil, The Triffids, Goanna – bands that tried to make sense of a country and its shadows.

Tonight’s set leans hard on Underneath, the new album that continues the collective’s earnest search for meaning in a more inward direction. It’s less postcard-accessible than Small Town Pub and Nullarbor — older tunes that reliably lift the energy when long intros and murmured set-ups lead attention to drift. The new material is thematically dense, deliberate, sometimes elusive.

But JOY is pure high. Horses Will Run creeps and surges with dream-state drama. Frontman Louis Parsons doesn’t so much sing as declaim. He’s insistent, on edge, but rarely quite decipherable in the wiry ensemble attack. Hellyer’s heroic trumpet and wailing blues harp are recurring motifs, adding flashes of texture and tension that hark back to Aussie pub rock forebears.

Louis Parsons, lead singer and guitarist for Melbourne rock band Floodlights, performs on stage at the Forum on May 24, 2025Credit: Martin Philbey

Mid-show, the piano-led Melancholy Cave wants to pull the room into a hush, but the crowd seems elsewhere. There’s a nagging sense that much of Underneath hasn’t quite landed yet—at least not live.

But Buoyant is a late-set victory. As promised by the title, the room levitates. The crowd picks up the booming hook and sways into a proper old-school beer barn moment. And the sprawling 5AM is an epic set closer of slow-building, stadium-targeted proportions.

“It’s been an emotional day for us,” Parsons offers gratefully before the single-song encore. Golden oldie Painting of My Time is the climax the night needs and again, the room rises to meet its all-in chanting refrain. It’s late, but a moment of exhilarated arrival that makes the journey worthwhile. Floodlights don’t always hit their mark. But there’s no question they know what they’re aiming for.
Reviewed by Michael Dwyer

THEATRE
Endgames ★★★
fortyfivedownstairs, until June 1

Three brief encounters with hideous men achieve a sense of twilit tragicomedy in the hands of the legendary Max Gillies.

The legendary Max Gillies stars in Endgames at fortyfivedownstairs.Credit: Jodie Hutchinson

With Endgames, Gillies rejoins director Laurence Strangio to present what’s in some ways a companion piece to their 2018 production of Krapp’s Last Tape – this time uniting the late Beckett work Eh Joe with an excerpt from Jack Hibberd’s classic monodrama A Stretch of the Imagination and Chekhov’s shambolic lecture On the Harmful Effects of Tobacco.

Although Hibberd died last year, the curtain may long continue to fall on his immortal stage creation, Monk O’Neill. The misanthropic hermit in Stretch remains an incarnation of Australian male destructiveness and despair as appalling as he is compelling.

Hibberd used this character to diagnose cultural disease – from slashing misogyny to the rapacity and bad faith of colonialism – with a clear-eyed honesty that reshaped what was possible on our stages, and this excerpt includes Monk’s final will and testament, in which he gives:

‘All my lands and property, goods and chattels, to the Aboriginal peoples of Australia … On no account must my domain fall into the clutches of the predatory and upstart albino. I believe that the tides of history will swamp and wash aside this small pink tribe of mistletoe men, like insects …Change insects to dead leaves…’

With Endgames, Gillies rejoins director Laurence Strangio.Credit: Jodie Hutchinson

One Tree Hill isn’t his to give, of course, and even Monk’s presence is erased in this version, largely an audio performance under crepuscular lighting.

Gillies only appears once, rifle in hand, pursuing “an emu on heat” through the shadows; the brilliantly produced soundscape, however, overfills the physical absence – not least in the copious, and comically loud, urination which bookends the piece.

If that whets the appetite for a proper remount of Stretch, the audio monologue in Eh Joe is part of Beckett’s creative intention. The elderly loner here sits entombed in silence on a couch, as the accusatory voice of a woman (Jillian Murray) torments him with memory and regret.

As he seduced women in his life, so this internal voice now seduces him towards death, and Gillies’ wordless performance haunts with barely perceptible pain and confusion, with the agony of futile presence.

Gillies has always had a talent for clowning, and in the Chekhov, he leans into a more overtly satirical sort of existential monologue. Nyukhin is a nervy, ineffectual public speaker. The man is supposed to be giving a charity lecture on the evils of tobacco, but it keeps turning into a digressive complaint about his wife and daughters, whom he fears.

The actor fumbles his lines more than a few times, which matters less than it might when he’s playing a character who wishes he could erase his memory, and whose comical lack of authority is his defining feature.

Elegant visual design replicates the mysterious alchemy of language that ghosts these figures as they circle through worlds extinguished, or perhaps never lit.
Reviewed by Cameron Woodhead

The Booklist is a weekly newsletter for book lovers from Jason Steger. Get it delivered every Friday.