“I’m writing about luminescent organisms, living creatures which emit light from their insides,” singer-songwriter Ichiko Aoba tells Apple Music about the namesake of her eighth studio album, Luminescent Creatures. The album is Aoba’s first studio offering since 2020’s Windswept Adan and, despite the gap, the two albums are deeply connected. In fact, some English versions of Windswept Adan change the final track’s Japanese title—“Adan no Shima no Tanjyosai” (or, the Birth Festival of Adan Island)—to “Luminescent Creatures”. Both albums are rooted in Aoba's experiences travelling around the islands of Okinawa, Japan’s southernmost prefecture known for its subtropical weather and clear beaches. Windswept Adan offered listeners dealing with the COVID-19 pandemic a quiet, dreamy respite, and eventually sent Aoba on tours across Japan, the US and Europe. Despite her growing international fame, Aoba kept returning to Okinawa, diving deeper into its oceans and discovering deeper musical worlds. As she dove, she found herself once again focusing on the motif of “luminescent creatures”. “Plankton were the first creatures born after the formation of the Earth,” Aoba explains. “At first, they were just drifting. But then, when they began to communicate, and had something they wanted to say, they did so by shining. I thought that was lovely.” Aoba continues: “They glowed because they realised that each individual was all alone. I think that’s the natural course of the evolution of living things, but I felt it was a very romantic story. Even now, inside all of us, when our emotions swell up, or when we love or think we might like someone, there’s a feeling like some part of our cells are flashing brightly. I wanted to honour that very first reaction of our minds and bodies, so I gave the album that title.” For both Windswept Adan and Luminescent Creatures, Aoba worked with the same team of collaborators: composer Taro Umebayashi, photographer Kodai Kobayashi and engineer Toshihiko Kasai. Aoba’s deep trust in Umebayashi is reflected in their writing process. “It’s been about four years since [Windswept Adan], but during that time, we were hard at work on this album every day,” she says. First, Aoba would create a demo with her playing guitar and humming. The song would then progress as Aoba and Umebayashi tested out various approaches: Umebayashi would freely add his own arrangements to the demos, or they would divide parts between the two of them and write from there, or they would fuse songs together which they’d written separately. Additionally, the inspiration drawn from Kobayashi’s photographs and the sound design provided by Kasai were indispensable for the album’s creation. “While I was becoming aware that the stories of creatures born on the Earth exist within us all, I played in ensembles with many people,” Aobi says. “I think of this as ‘our’ album.” Luminescent Creatures aims to give the listener a sense of the eternal flow of time. Aoba offered some thoughts on some of the album’s key tracks. “COLORATURA” "There are few lyrics in the second half, but this song has a very emotional vocal arrangement. Without drawing much from words, I wanted to focus on expressing the flickering of living things and the trembling feeling of living. When making a vocal arrangement, I try to listen carefully to the world the song contains.” “24° 03’ 27.0” N, 123° 47’ 7.5” E” “The title of this song is expressed in latitude and longitude, the coordinates of which point to a lighthouse. Mr. Umebayashi made this arrangement for me after listening to a recording of me playing guitar in a plunky way while singing a folk song from Hateruma [one of the islands of Okinawa]. I’m not obsessed with singing folk songs yet. Rather, when I arrive at a place to do research, I gather whatever naturally comes up. My friend hummed a wonderful tune, so I wanted to try to imitate singing it. It just so happened to be a song sung at ritual events on Hateruma. We call this song ‘Wity’.” “mazamun” “The title, ‘mazamun’, means ‘demon’ or ‘evil spirit’. Someone I became friends with on the island told me, ‘There is a mazamun in that house.’ Everyone seems to be afraid of and dislike mazamun, but the place where he told me one existed wasn’t scary at all. At that moment, I realised that fear was less about the target of the fear and more about the feelings of the people who feel afraid. When talking to a group of women on the island, I found out that there are also people who believe we can be friends with the mazamun. I thought that was very beautiful. And so I wrote this song from the perspective of something which feels scary, but is actually a friend or supporter.” “tower” “Mr Umebayashi and I took a special approach to crafting this song. Each of us wrote half. I wrote the first half, and Mr Umebayashi wrote the second half. But it’s not that we switched off writing the song. We each happened to write a waltz on the same day. We even wrote them in the same key. So we just pushed them together.” “FLAG” “I usually write the lyrics first, so my image of a song is often awoken by the landscape and scenery held in the words. To whatever extent I have a story, I think about what kind of soundtrack would be good for that story. In this song, I imagined a very dark world where, in the middle of a gloomy night with no light at all, a flag is flapping in the wind.” “Cochlea” “Right after I had a conversation with an actor friend of mine where we said we wanted to go see whales, I went to Amami Oshima [the biggest of the Amami Islands north of Okinawa]. There, I swam with a whale parent and child. Even after they swam out of sight, our captain dropped an underwater microphone to the sea floor to pick up their voices, and we could hear them on the ship’s speaker. I recorded it on my iPhone and used it for this song. The real thing is a little clearer, but we got this sound by adding in some layers of effects.”