The music of Ichiko Aoba traces the blurred borders between apparent opposites. On the Japanese guitarist and singer-songwriter’s new album, Luminescent Creatures, she sings often of dissolved demarcations — between life and death, light and dark, angels and demons, the water within our bodies and the water without, earth and sea and sky.

Aoba knows more about these borders than most. On frequent trips to Okinawa and the southern islands of the Ryūkyū Archipelago, she dives without gear, disappearing into the salt-water crush. “When you’re diving, you can only go as far as your breath lasts, so death is right around the corner,” she tells me, speaking through an interpreter from across an imposing conference table in her American distributor’s Brooklyn office. “It’s a fearful experience, but it’s so beautiful at the same time. Sometimes I feel like I’m looking at the beautiful vision right before I die.”

Beyond this death drive, Aoba dives to surround herself with the bioluminescent creatures of the sea — creatures that, for one reason or another, have evolved over the eons to produce their own light. “Once you dive, you see plankton and jellyfish that illuminate in rainbows of different colors; they float all around you like little UFOs,” she says, adding the second half in English.

Aoba’s fascination with bioluminescent life began by accident. In 2019, she visited Ishinomaki, a port city known for its whaling industry. “I saw them dissect a whale almost every day,” she says. Wishing to see live whales, she traveled south to the Ryūkyū Islands. She began her diving expeditions far from shore, in an area where mothers were known to raise their calves. Finding them proved more difficult than she’d imagined, but, as she cast her eyes toward the black depths, she experienced the ocean’s aurora for the first time.

When Aoba was 18, she moved from her hometown, Kyoto, to Tokyo in pursuit of her first and only musical educator, eight-string guitar luminary Anmi Yamada. As a young girl, she’d tried piano lessons but dropped out after two weeks, uncomfortable with learning an instrument in a group setting. Instead, she taught herself guitar.

Learning from Yamada was different. By the time her apprenticeship began, she’d already learned most of his songs by attending every concert he played in Kyoto during her mid-teens, inhaling his catalog until it became part of her every breath, and transposing his notes from from eight-string to six — no easy task for a guitarist with no formal training.

This practice remained, in some ways, unchanged when Yamada started giving her lessons in person. “Mostly, I’d just watch and learn,” she says. “Sometimes he gave me homework, saying, ‘Listen to this CD all day and feel the difference it makes at the end of the day, how you play before and after you listen, observing how you change as a guitar player.’”

Singing came less naturally, but she developed a method for overcoming her initial shyness: “When I debuted, I’d already separated from Anmi, but whenever I’m singing, I always remind myself of the joy when I was studying with him,” she says. “That’s what drives me to sing. I’m not really the kind of artist who says, ‘Please listen to my singing voice,’ but I want to keep that memory alive.”

Through Yamada, Aoba found Belgian-French Manouche and Sinti jazz guitarist Django Reinhardt’s Djangology; it revolutionized her playing style the moment she laid ears on it. A copy of the CD sits on our Williamsburg conference table, and as she waits for her interpreter to relay her words to me, she carefully picks the spokes from the center of the disc’s jewel case, laying them out in a neat line. When she finishes, she begins to doodle in a notebook — first a whale; then, above it, a luminescent creature.

A few hours later, Aoba sits between two massive industrial speakers in the listening area above Public Records, a multi-room venue a few miles south of the office where we conducted our interview. She wears a flowing silver dress that glints gold as it catches the light of early sunset. Posture perfect, guitar laid comfortably across her lap, she seems completely at ease, despite the language barrier. She greets the small crowd of journalists, publicists, label reps, and friends with a smile and a few words before beginning a 35-minute set comprising songs from her new album — and one even newer track called “Sayonara, Penguin.”

Her guitar and vocals sound just like they do on the record: dextrous and crystalline. It’s hard to believe she’s never had voice lessons. A few songs in, she switches her guitar out for a sanchin, a three-stringed instrument with a snakeskin body, native to Okinawa and its surrounding islands. She uses it to accompany herself on “24° 3′ 27.0″ N, 123° 47′ 7.5″ E,” a song whose title relays the coordinates of a lighthouse on Hateruma, Japan’s southernmost inhabited island. The track is a rendition of an ancient folk song from the island, one she says only locals are allowed to learn. Though she first visited Hateruma as research for an acting role in 2013, she began to spend more time there as the years went on, and the islanders accepted her, inviting her to locals-only festivals and, eventually, teaching her the song. The lyrics of its final verse are in a dialect specific to the region, rendering them incomprehensible to the vast majority of her audience.

“COLORATURA,” Luminescent Creatures’opening track, takes a similar tack. Mixing snippets of traditional Japanese with island phrases, whispers with breathy coos, the song has many words, but its liner notes contain only a couplet: “To the lull of a gentle wave / Stormbreak, tailwind pushing us.” When I ask her to expand on the lyrics, though, she’s confused. “I never said that,” she insists. The song, she says, is a non-specific spell, an inscrutable puzzle that takes many listens to decipher.

At many moments on Luminescent Creatures and 2020’s Windwept Adan, Aoba regresses to a pre-lingual state, singing pure melodies instead of words. She’s obsessed with whales, who communicate not only with their haunting “songs” but also via underwater echolocation. “They use wavelengths to communicate, and they’ve been doing that for a long time,” she says. “They even understand whether you’re pregnant or not but just based on the wavelengths. We could learn from that.”

In a 2021 interview with the Japanese magazine Tokion, she expounded on her fascination with the origins of earthly communication, billions of years before whales and humans evolved. “The first plankton to be born must’ve felt startled but happy,” she said. “After learning of its loneliness, it must’ve lit itself up to find a mate. I want to carry that plankton’s force with me and live my life. I hope to remain that way, even after my physical body dies.”

Aoba’s desire to demonstrate the shared experience of plankton and humans was the inspiration for Luminescent Creatures. “We all live as human beings on our own, and when we want to connect, it’s not really bioluminescence,” she explains. “But in our brains, the synapses react to our emotions, and something sparks. That’s the exact same feeling we share with the oldest creatures on the earth. Their existence and our existence are pretty much the same thing.”

At times, the borders between the songs of Luminescent Creatures are clear. “FLAG,” for instance, is a small, closed room in which Aoba sings to you directly, accompanied only by her guitar. “Luciferéne,” on the other hand, is like the ocean’s endless expanse; listen long enough, and you’ll find yourself swimming alongside Aoba, staring in awe at the spectacular light show below the surface. Still, there’s no denying these songs belong together. “You can be totally different and still coexist as one organism, and I wanted to show that,” Aoba says. She carefully constructed most of the record’s pieces between these two extremes, creating “tracks that can wrap around these two songs, like cushions between them,” she elaborates.

One such track is “aurora.” It’s close to “FLAG” in sonic palette, but its dynamics and harmonies open wider as it goes on, unlocking myriad potentialities in just over two minutes. “Not smoke nor sorrow / Look up at that beautiful sky,” she sings. Unlike “COLORATURA,” she wanted this song’s message to be laid out in plain language. “I made it on the day last year where you could see the aurora [borealis] from most of the world,” she says. “I was thinking about the wonder of this beautiful action happening in the sky, while on the land, so many horrible things are happening. I wanted to remember this day when no matter what was happening on the ground, you could still look up at the sky and see the aurora. I want people who have guns to drop them for a second and look up at the sky.”

Many of the songs on Luminescent Creatures come from the Windswept Adan era, a period when the most salient settings for Aoba were the unspoiled Ryūkyū Islands and a city in deep COVID lockdown. With no one in the street in Tokyo, Aoba could hear the wind going through the buildings and other surprising sounds that are usually toned down when people are out and about. “I started to notice the power of the land in Tokyo,” she said. “I didn’t realize how many birds there are.” As the months went by, she told Tokion, her ears physically “softened,” growing more sensitive to their ambient environment.

As pandemic restrictions loosened, and she and her collaborators — composer/arranger Taro Umebayashi and photographer Kodai Kobayashi — developed the audiovisual world these two albums would go on to occupy, Aoba attempted to remain in this headspace, but Tokyo’s return to its frenzied state often made it impossible to do so. Overwhelmed and unable to access her adopted underwater home, she turned her eyes toward the stars. These giant orbs, beamed into our retinas from the infinitely distant past, overwhelm in almost the opposite way.

Luminescent Creatures closes with “惑星の泪 (Wakusei no Namida),” a vocal/acoustic track in which Aoba’s voice sounds distant but completely clear. “In dreams I see you tenderly spread the tears of stars,” she sings near the end. “And when they overflow, interwoven in space-time, the ripples of stars, here.” Delivered on a deeply lonesome melody, the words are almost too much to take.

Is it an ode to a last loved one? A general lament on the loneliness of the human condition? It depends who’s listening, she says. “From the point of view of a human being, this planet is home and we live now. But when you zoom out of the earth, as if you don’t have a body, you start to miss the planet.

“The ocean is the place where you really feel the atmosphere, gravity; you’re closely connected to everything,” she continues. “But when you pull yourself away, you remember the feeling of living on this planet — sad things, happiness, everything that happened here.” Whether engulfed in ocean waters or swimming backward through spacetime, homesick for Planet Earth, Aoba reminds us of the light that connects all living things.