022: Ichiko Aoba, Windswept Adan + RIP David Lynch 💔

Serene Japanese chamber folk and my miniature tribute to one of America's greatest artists.

BREAKING NEWS: I wrote this issue over a week ago and it was scheduled to send out first thing on Friday morning. David Keith Lynch, a hero of our time, died on Thursday, January 16. I’ll leave the rest of the original newsletter as is below, but first I had to pay my respects to one of America’s greatest artists with the mini-essay that follows.

A part of me thought he would live forever, and this feeling of mourning for a stranger who has nevertheless deeply influenced and impacted my life feels as unsettling as the work of his that we love so much.

No one catalogued the twin (pun intended) sides of America as masterfully, in their own distinct way, as David Lynch. He was so fucking singular that his vision is captured forever in the arts lexicon with the adjective bearing his name: you know exactly what is meant when something is described as Lynchian.

Innocence, purity, darkness, terror, joy, fear. His work stretched into the depths of our souls and minds, felt around and fried a nerve or two, burrowed in and made a home. To be a Lynch obsessive is to have a piece of that eternal pulsing weirdness lodged within you forever.

His work was so dark and sinister, it's easy to think he thought the world was ruled by evil. But again and again, he showed us the gutwrenching value in the pursuit of good, however fraught it may be. An essential core of his work is present in one of my favorite lines from Twin Peaks: when Major Garland Briggs is asked what his biggest fear is, and he responds: “The possibility that love is not enough.” I share this fear, and I have no answers, but I always found comfort in Lynch's imagination, no matter how menacing it could be on the other side of the mirror.

I've barely even touched on his deep experimentalism and dedication to his vision. Twin Peaks: The Return felt like an unbelievable blessing upon release in the year of 2017. It feels like even more of one now. Rest in peace, David Keith Lynch. Thank you for everything. In heaven, everything is fine. 💔

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Welcome to my attempt at a weekly newsletter. The trick to me pulling this off is to keep it short and sweet, so each Friday I’ll send out just one album recommendation. Sometimes it will be new music, but other times it will be whatever has been catching my attention.

The first selection I have for you is an album from 2020 that I somehow missed at the time: Windswept Adan by Ichiko Aoba. Aoba is a Japanese folk singer and songwriter who mainly plays and composes on the guitar, though she also plays piano, clarinet, accordion, and flute. This is her seventh album and I have only heard a fraction of her other music so far, though I look forward to spending more time with it eventually. Windswept Adan was her first album to be majorly noticed outside Japan; it was critically acclaimed and significantly broadened her audience. I’m still shocked that it took four years to find its way into my life, because it feels like it was made in a lab specifically to appeal to me: a soundtrack to an imaginary film about a fictional island named Adan, musically a constellation of folk, jazz, contemporary classical, psychedelic, and ambient, with instrumentation that includes a celesta, wind chimes, string arrangements, and field recordings taken by Aoba on trips to the Ryukyu Islands. OH, OKAY.

(I am partial to the “soundtrack to imaginary film” concept: see the wonderful Waterless Hills’ The Great Mountain, also from 2020, for another glorious example of this. The nonexistent film is inspired by the travels of Freya Stark, an early 20th-century Anglo-Italian explorer and travel writer, and the music is appropriately gorgeous – roving, Western-tinged post-rock.)

Windswept Adan may be one of the most peaceful and serene albums I’ve ever heard. I have also pretty much never heard anything that approaches the emotional and sonic grandeur of Joanna Newsom’s masterpiece Ys but this comes close. Aoba is a guitarist rather than a harpist, but they share a certain dramatic depth, a swelling sense of the cinematic. I also can’t speak to her lyrics at all, being that she sings in Japanese, whereas Newsom’s lyrics are incredibly literary and an impressive part of her whole thing, but when I listen to Windswept Adan, I am overcome with many of the same feelings that listening to Ys gives me. I really love it.

Favorite songs: “Porcelain” and “Hagupit” and “Dawn in the Adan” especially, which I would say is one of the most beautiful songs I have heard, period, in a very long time.

Listen if you like: Joanna Newsom’s Ys, gauzy materials, the empty swimming pool in 3 Women without the menace, the idea of comfy synth

There’s more: Aoba has an exquisite, impressionistic new album due out in February, called Luminescent Creatures, and a world tour that’s actually coming to Detroit!

Do you like this format? Do you hate this format? Actually, I don’t care if you hate it. But I do hope you like it! I already have all of January and most of February planned out and I really look forward to more regular writing.

Now Reading: “Have You Ever Thought About Killing Someone?” by Rachel Monroe
Just Finished: Hit Parade of Tears by Izumi Suzuki