It’s difficult to know where to start. No less a talent than Owen Pallett once said that he had “never been so blindsided by a musician as I was by Ichiko Aoba”, and seeing her tonight I can fully understand why. A decently sized crowd are gathered tonight, sat in assembly-room rows of seats and standing around the edges of the room – testament to a steadily growing fanbase, and as the artist comes on stage, complete silence descends, or more accurately I think it ascends from the crowd. Alone with a classical guitar, Aoba treats us to a set that draws heavily from her latest, seventh album Windswept Adan, the first in fact to feature more developed orchestration. Tonight we must be hearing these lushly arranged songs as they were first conceived, as immediate and intimate as her previous albums, showing off a range of influences that draws from folk, classical guitar and inflections of bossa nova.
Ichiko Aoba is a rare talent, very very good at what she does, and I cannot recall a live set sounding so perfect. The soft warmth of her nylon guitar strings shines through as she pulls of impeccable harmonics and fingerpicked textures, and her voice is exquisite, never missing a note, never sounding anything less than perfect. This is a room full of people held in a spell, a great reminder of how powerful live music can be in the right hands.