‘My shadow is music. Wherever I may wander, here I am. If I walk, music walks with me. A new melody rises from the soles of my feet. I will be with music for the rest of my life’.

by Luca Testoni

Ladies and gentlemen, meet Ichiko Aoba, one of the most original voices on Japan’s contemporary music scene.

On March 13, her world tour will make a stop in Milan. The ideal occasion to listen live to the dreamy and highly original folk music of the 34-year-old singer, songwriter, composer and multi-instrumentalist from Kyoto. The concert will be held at the Auditorium San Fedele.

Classical guitar, piano, keyboards and vocals, each piece that Aoba writes and then sings becomes a journey that regulates strong emotions and manages to be evocative and melancholic at the same time.

Attempts to describe her sound are wasted. Critics, who have highly praised her (and not only in her homeland…), have spoken of ‘chamber folk with elements of jazz, classical, ambient and minimalism’.

The Milan concert will be linked inseparably to the release of the new album, ‘Luminescent Creatures’, available at the end of February. A sort of sequel to the 2020 album, ‘Windswept Adan’, her seventh record, conceived as if it were a soundtrack to an imaginary film set on two imaginary islands – one where the main protagonist comes from and another, teeming with flora and fauna, where she is abducted -, in which there was room for a great variety of sounds (such as string arrangements and field recordings) and instruments (such as the celesta or wind chimes).

With ‘Luminescent Creatures’, Aoba tries to explore the order of life and also focuses on concepts such as bioluminescence, i.e. the light emitted by organisms such as deep-sea fish, as the first form of communication.

Info: https://ponderosa.it/event/milano-it-119/

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