The last we heard from the Japanese singer and sometime video game composer Ichiko Aoba was on 2020’s album Windswept Adan, a science-fiction tale set on a far-future version of the Ryukyu archipelago, the chain of islands that stretch from Kyushu in the south-west of Japan towards Taiwan. Luminescent Creatures takes its title from the English version of the last track on the previous album, “Adan no Shima no Tanjōsai”. Now, the narrative has extended further: all human life has left and the archipelago has been returned to wildlife.
For a fictional story, Luminescent Creatures has some surprisingly strong elements of documentary — Aoba visited the archipelago repeatedly during its composition, free diving in rough seas and immersing herself in the shifting patterns of the seasons.
The brief fragment “24° 03’ 27.0” N, 123° 47’ 7.5” E” is a traditional folk melody from the southernmost island, Hateruma. The co-ordinates are the location of its lighthouse, and the theme of communicating through light runs throughout the album. “Let a raft of light float upon the roars of the sea,” she sings over the pretty melody of “Mazamun”, amid tiny droplets of keyboard. On “Aurora” she can only faintly be heard, like a transmission from deep space, under the charango arpeggios.
The spectral whisper of “Flag” talks of the “footprints left on retinas” and sees reincarnation through a “fulgor of light” (the closest English translation of the Japanese, signifying a dazzling splendour). And on the splendid “Luciférine”, the album’s centrepiece, amid strings and distorted synthesised twinkles, she has “known always, a light deep within the soul.” The music drifts and sways. Taro Umebayashi’s piano rises like a pearl diver heading for the surface, then darts away like a shoal of tiny fish. “Inside each of us there is a place for our stars to sleep.”
★★★★☆
‘Luminescent Creatures’ is released by Hermine