Join us for dinner & drinks before the show in The Lounge, our full-service restaurant & bar which opens at 6pm. Check out the menu & make reservations here. Mezzanine ticket holders will be able to order from The Lounge menu right from their seat.
World Cafe Live is a nonprofit independent venue where artistry meets social impact. Every purchase helps support our free music education & community programs. Click here to learn more.
Unless otherwise stated, World Cafe Live will follow the City of Philadelphia’s current Covid-19 guidelines.
Ichiko Aoba
Website | Facebook | Instagram | Twitter
“Windswept Adan”, the seventh studio album from rising Japanese singer and guitarist Ichiko Aoba, is a singer-songwriter album, a concept album, apiece of chamber music, and a contemporary orchestral work. It is heavily influenced by jazz, by folk and by impressionistic classical music. It is a soundtrack to an imaginary film; it is an album that tells a story; it is apiece of fantasy science fiction set to music; it is a sonic voyage through the East China Sea.
“It is written as the soundtrack to a fictitious movie,” says Ichiko.“It is a story about a girl who goes from the fictional Kirinaki Island – an island inhabited by a tribe of inbred families – to Adan Island. Adan has no language. The girl meets the creatures that live on that island and traces the roots of her life while gifting shells to the natives of Adan Island.
Where Ichiko’s previous songs have been open to interpretation, she wants “Windswept Adan” to tell a very specific story. “We wanted the music to express things like the temperature flowing in the story, the girl’s facial expression, and the smell of the sea breeze,” she says. “It was like a piece of acting for me. I think I’ve become able to think more three-dimensionally about works and stages.”
Ichiko’s vantage point constantly changes point-of-view throughout the album. “The lyrics shift from the perspective of the girl who is the main character, to the perspective of the plants that live on the island, to a bundle of lives that straddle space and time.” The album is arranged in chronological order, telling the story of the girl’s journey between islands. Opener “Prologue” places the listener squarely on the coral archipelago, with bells, birds and a field recording of the sea that Aoba made herself on the Honohoshi coast of Amami Oshima.