It simply felt like a dream. That’s the only real way to describe Ichiko Aoba’s performance at the Sydney Opera House for VIVID LIVE.
In the middle of a festival that thrives on sensory overload, Aoba offered us something slower and beautifully detached from the teeming cityscape outside. The Japanese artist had transformed the theatre into a living still life: soft lamplight, scattered florals, and a quiet rug grounding the scene in a kind of surrealism. Everything felt intentional, but also like it was pulled from a memory.
Aoba is known for crafting music that exists somewhere between reality and daydream. Since her 2010 debut ‘Kamisori Otome’, she’s carved out a cult following for her dreamlike compositions, gentle guitar work and heavenly vocals. Her 2020 concept album ‘Windswept Adan’ expanded that world, layering ambient textures with orchestral fragments inspired by the Ryukyu Archipelago. It’s this world-building that made her VIVID set feel like a drift through a celestial inner landscape.
Alone on stage with her guitar, a delicate kimono wrapped around her, she drew the room into stillness. Her voice was fragile, focused, almost translucent – and it floated through the space like the last echo of something you’re not quite sure you heard. The songs unfolded slowly and without insistence, tracing emotional contours rather than chasing any hooks. Ichiko Aoba builds a room inside a room, and only then are you invited to sit still in it.
image credit: Jess Hutton
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