Ichiko Aoba — Windswept Adan

2020: the year of Aoba

This isn’t the first time this year I’m falling madly in love with Ichiko Aoba’s music. In June, I wrote about her unbelievably beautiful live album, “gift” at Sogetsu Hall (Live). It was a short piece replete with superlatives and very little exposition; I was younger and dumber and, as I said, madly in love, so I apologise for how clearly swept away I sound in that piece. Last week, Aoba released Windswept Adan, her latest full-length, and it is just as deserving of gaga-prose. 

Why music is important

My first run-through of this album was on laptop speakers a couple of hours after waking up on the wrong side of bed. You know the sort of world-weary anxiety that gets painted with the broad brush stroke of existential crisis? It was the same old story: a life meandering wherewards? Three kitties lazed around me, licking themselves silly, seemingly mimicking my own fidgetiness; animals tend to mirror, I understand. I usually don’t commit the cardinal sin of playing any music out loud near them, lest I disturb the fragile balance of spirits that keeps them from pawing at each other, but it just didn’t occur to me, so swept away by hopelessness was I.

And then the music began to float out of the sides of my laptop. Self-soothing licking gave way to grooming licking, I made myself coffee, sat down, and started to work. I even opened my calendar and started marking out tasks and targets, preparing for meetings and whatnot. Slowly but surely, preparedness began to replace worry. Grooming replaced self-soothing, in a way. In a way, I was mirroring the cats. Maybe that tends to happen too. Just as it’s true that animals and human beings respond naturally to aural stimuli. Some works are just so beautiful that they lull us into being calm. Windswept Adan is one such work. 

The beauty of simplicity in music

I’ve often spoken about the allure of simplicity; in fact I spoke about just that in my previous conversation about Ichiko Aoba’s music, and even in my recent piece about The Tallest Man On Earth. Most songs in this album are just the ethereal voice of Aoba against the backdrop of a pad / strings plus one other analog instrument (usu. the guitar). Its song structures are also usually easy to define: a gentle stream-of-conscious meandering from a starting point to an end point. But this simplicity hides three deeper truths. First, that simplicity doesn’t preclude intricacy. While the songs’ structure and components are simple, the backbone of each of them is usually an immaculately produced, often intricately finger-picked, entirely unique chord progression, imparting a dreamlike quality to each song. Second, that simplicity doesn’t preclude uniqueness; in fact, often, simplicity helps unlock an artist’s idiosyncrasies. This album’s single-minded focus on its basic thesis on how a good song is written ensures there’s not a single prosaic moment on it: not one vocal melody you’ve heard before, not one chord progression that reminds you of another from some other songwriter. And third, that simplicity often yields results of unimaginable beauty.

When I last wrote about an Ichiko Aoba album this year, I said it was my favourite album of the year. I’ve since then said that about Klô Pelgag’s Notre-Dame-des-Sept-Douleurs and thought that about Yaeji’s What We Drew 우리가 그려왔. But as things stand, it might just be Windswept Adan that takes the cake. This is a beautiful piece of art: one that I believe everybody must experience at least once.