The Japanese composer Ichiko Aoba’s seventh record, the first to be released outside her country, offers a timely hidden door to another, quieter world. Drawing on her experience as a soundtracker of theatre productions and video games such as The Legend of Zelda: Link’s Awakening, Windswept Adan finds Aoba moving beyond the simple voice-and-guitar arrangements of her previous releases to create, in collaboration with Taro Umebayashi, AKA Milk, a psych-folk sci-fi story set on Adan, a fictional island based on the Ryukyu archipelago.
From Prologue, with its deep drone, wash of waves and circling, priestessly choral voices to the closing Adan no Shima no Tanjyosai and its sparsely plucked guitar and elegiac strings and flute, the album casts a still, soothing spell. Anyone charmed by the deep delicacy of Nick Drake, Joanna Newsom or Isobel Campbell’s the Gentle Waves will find many byways to wander, from the graceful Easter Lily, in which slow kalimba and guitar arpeggios build twinkling layers that shift subtly, revealing shadows, to Hagupit, an eerier, ghostlier thing with a keening melody. It’s a remarkable feat of musical world-building that will pull you back to Adan’s shores again and again.
