WHen Ichiko Aoba stood up to present it at ST Martin-IN-The Fields in London in September 2024, most people were unable to see the Japanese singer at first. The Georgian Parish Church does not have a stage, just a postal seal of a red platform. Awba is not long. “I was a little tense,” she says. “The staff of the place told me that it would be difficult for people to see, so I kept thinking about how to massage people and relieve them.”
Aoba, 35, talks about a video call from Tokyo. Her atmosphere in the conversation is the same on the stage: quiet but not shy, thoughtful, funny and direct. In St Martin’s, she walked in the corridor, guitar is on hand, sat on the Flagstone floor, and large white skirts that rise like powdered ice, and began to sing, unwanted. The fans of silence. “He approached more”, and everyone who can do it.
Since her first appearance for the year 2010, Kamisori otome (Razorblade Girl), the amazing Awba music quietly earned it a crowd of loyal fans. She is a prominent guitarist with a voice like wind ringing and a similar way to air with a tune. It sells large places immediately, and the Japanese music states are sought by Ryichi Sakamoto, Cornellius and Haromi Hosono. However, she says: “I really don’t think about myself as my music. I just love the voice. Sometimes I am still amazed when I was described as an artist.”
She has her autobiography by the artist by any scale: eight studio albums, eight live albums, a contribution to the 2017 Ghost in the shell. However, Oba says with a smile. This month, her ninth album is released, Luminescent creatures. For guitar, threads, life and keyboard, it sings from the scattered light and the things that glow in the dark; Aurora, Tower, Science. In April, you will completely perform the album in Barbican, London.
Owa was born in Uraasu, not far from Tokyo Disneyland, and grew up near Kyoto. At school, she sang differently in a choir, played the crinite in a copper band and entered into a light music club. But after interviewing the Japanese guitarist consisting of anime series Yamada, with a composing free single songs, she made a trip. She would have learned his songs and then had Masterclasses with him on the phone. These days, to record her music, she says she needs very relaxing, as she is almost asleep.
How did you achieve this on Earth? “I must trust the moment,” she says. “If I focus on being my song, or this person is in the audience, or that the light is very bright, or the sound is nourished when I play” – it is a little air guitar – “do not do it” work. But if you just leave ” – shake his hands in the air -” and I really think the music will be my protection, I can reach a meditation -like condition. “
It is an accurate description of its fans as well. They are gestures. “When people write to me, they will say that they spent a great time at a concert but also, at a deeper level, they found space where they felt safe, or where they found that they could forgive.” She shows me a pile of decorated circumstances she likes in front of her and then accumulates under her head like a pillow: “This makes me very happy. Keep them next to my bed.”
Oba loves ancient Japanese and Anomatopoi. You wonder what the plants remember. It has visions of the landscape that it has not visited before, and it is attracted to the idea of sound as a way to form: the whale song, the sonar, the location of the echo. When I remember Daniel Kish, the blind hostility that listens on his way through the woods quickly, it flounders and applauds. “Sometimes,” she says, “during the party, I will just close my eyes to see how long I can play before I make a mistake. I often think about making an album like talking to a friend, and telling them about anything interesting that happened that day.”
When Aoba launched the official fans community at Patreon, it was called Atólba, after “Atoll” because it imagines this to be: a magic island, which is a safe iris space, people similar to thinking can meet. Her famous album 2020, WindsWept Adan, “The soundtrack of a fictional movie” was released. Are glossy creatures isolated as well, its own world? “This time, instead of the story, it is like the dictionary,” with every path, I grow, “she says.
Google is the title of the second song, 24 ° 3 ′ 27.0 ″ N, 123 ° 47 ′ 7.5 ″ E, and you realize that it is the coordinates of the light at sea on the edge of Japanese water. “I was hoping that some people would find the island,” she says. “But mostly, I hope the album itself will be a lighthouse of some kind.”