Dozing off at a gig? For this cult musician, it’s a compliment

Listening to Luminescent Creatures, the newest album from Japanese folk musician Ichiko Aoba, I’ve lost count of the times I’ve missed my bus stop while ensconced in its undulating waves, a primordial calm that’s overwhelming. I could eat poisonous fungi and my heartbeat wouldn’t plunge to the lazy rhythm it does by the end of Mazamun, a song so gently evocative that you’d swear you’re on a creaky boat being lapped by the tides and not the 461X plodding down Parramatta Road.

Aoba, 35, giggles at this response to her music; 15 years and 10 albums deep into a career that’s drawn cultish devotion, she’s used to it. At gigs, seated on a Persian rug, enveloped in the warm glow of a lamp – its light bulb always orange, she says, “like the light bulbs they have on a night train” – she’ll glance across audiences and feel a collective exhale, eyes drowsy, oftentimes completely closed.

“It doesn’t offend me at all,” Aoba says, “I actually prefer when people are very relaxed when they listen to my music. Regardless of how big the venue is, I want it to feel as though the audience has been invited into my room, so they can really relax and enjoy the music.”

The 35-year-old won global acclaim for her 2020 masterpiece, Windswept Adan. Her new album Luminescent Creatures is described as its spiritual sequel.Credit: Yuichiro Noda

It’s a vibe reflected in Aoba’s mode of recording, too. She’s said that to write and record, she needs to be serene to the point of sleep. “To be too hyper-focused is detrimental to my music-making process, especially because a lot of my songs are inspired by dreams,” she says. “To get as close to that dream-like state is important to me, in the studio but also when I’m performing on stage. It just helps me perform better.”

Dreams are central to her creative process. “It’s important to me to not let the dreams I have end in the dream world, but rather bring them into the real world and live with them for a while. I’ll wake up and make notes from my dream and then I’ll just relive that story, add more details as I remember them. From there, I’ll find lyrics and a melody and chords and a harmony; that is how I make music.”

Naturally, a conversation with Aoba is just as hazy, if for a completely different reason. I don’t speak Japanese and she doesn’t speak English, meaning we’re caught in an overlapping three-way swirl aided by her translator, Luka Sandoval.

When we speak, Aoba’s in a hotel room in Utrecht in the Netherlands, amid a European tour. Wearing a beige knit sweater, her face framed by a blunt fringe, she’s as demure as you’d imagine but expressive in her answers, her gesturing hands looking to cut through the language barrier.

It might make for a stilted interview, but the language barrier hasn’t stopped Western audiences from embracing Aoba’s work. Her first album, Kamisori Otome released in 2010, introduced Aoba’s intricate guitar-work and ethereal vocals, but it was her fourth album, 2013’s 0 – produced by Zak, known for his work with influential Japanese dub band Fishmans – that expanded Aoba’s sound, incorporating the immersive field recordings that now typify her work.

“That was really the start of a big shift,” Aoba says. “At the time I was working a lot in theatre, both doing the music and acting on stage, and that widened my worldview from being very sparse and just making music on my own to looking at the bigger picture.”

The bigger picture reached its apex with 2020’s Windswept Adan, a lush concept album that made Aoba a global star. Released in the throes of the pandemic, listeners found an escapist salve in its grand ambition, songs like Parfum d’etoiles, Kirinaki Shima and Sagu Palm’s Song that blended chamber pop, ’60s folk, Erik Satie and nature recordings into full worlds you wanted to live in.

Five years on, Aoba has described Luminescent Creatures as a spiritual sequel to Windswept Adan, its songs inspired by the same trip that spawned Adan, where she followed the migration of whales from northern Japan to the Ryukyu Islands off Okinawa. With its maximalist harmonies, chimes and woodwinds, electronic washes that bring to life underwater enchantment and Aoba’s ever-present Disney and Studio Ghibli influences, opener Coloratura expands on its predecessor’s ambitions.

Each song started with a specific image, she says, and for Coloratura it was “a very weathered pirate ship, carrying ghosts, going into a raging storm and being swept up by the waves and finding it’s way underwater”. Mazamun was inspired by its namesake, a friendly imp said to live on Japan’s southernmost island. “The creature is feared by the people on the island, but one found its way to a certain house and refused to move on, so when I heard about that I wanted to become its friend,” says Aoba.

There were also influences more unlikely than sociable imps. James Cameron’s unending eco-parable, Avatar, for example. “I watched Avatar many, many times during the making of this,” Aoba laughs. It’s an understandable meeting of two artists entranced by the wonders, and despairing at the destruction, of the deep. Would she ever want to explore the Mariana Trench, like Cameron?

“Yes, I would love to,” says Aoba. As a non-swimmer, I fear the ocean. It’s clear Aoba does not. “No,” she says, “because if I was able to choose the matter of my own death, I would like to die on the ocean floor and become nutrients for the creatures in that ecosystem. Dying in the sea isn’t necessarily something that scares me.”

Luminescent Creatures continues Aoba’s grand orchestral soundscapes.

Dying on stage isn’t a problem either. Across YouTube comments and Reddit threads, fans describe Aoba’s gigs as religious experiences. While she grew up in a Buddhist family and attended Catholic school – “the act of putting your hands together to pray is something that’s common to both Buddhism and Catholicism; I still remember that as a very profound thing,” she says – Aoba is reluctant to define anyone’s experience at her upcoming shows at Vivid in Sydney (she’s already sold out three nights at the Opera House) and in Melbourne.

“I think of my music as a train station or an expansive plaza, rather than something anyone owns,” she says. “During a show, I’m just the caretaker of that place. It’s a place where people can come in their various forms, feel something, and leave.”

And, funnily enough for an artist whose work is so defined by the hypnagogic shadows of slumber, Aoba has one thing she’s most looking forward to experiencing on our shores. “Good coffee,” she laughs.

Ichiko Aoba’s Luminescent Creatures is out now. She will perform at Forum Melbourne on May 27 and at the Sydney Opera House on May 29-31.