There’s musicality, and then there’s whatever the hell Ichiko Aoba has access to.

The Japanese ambient-folk artist doesn’t just “live and breathe music” (media cliché, I know) – she speaks in music, moves in music, quite possibly is made of music. After a spellbinding performance in Reykjavík, I would not be surprised.

To even call it a performance feels kind of misleading. Sure, she came, she played, she stole every heart in the room. But mostly it felt like a collective submergence, where the audience, the air, and the architecture sank into a rare kind of harmony.

Of course, it helps that Harpa is one of Europe’s most beautiful venues, sitting right on edge of Reykjavík harbour with a view of snow-capped mountains across the glittering bay. Its iconic façade, inspired by the basalt columns found along Iceland’s stormy southern coast, catches the light in magical ways, making the boundary between structure and environment feel more like a conversation. Inside Norðurljós, the room where Aoba played, the geometry is more flowing than rigid, with hundreds of sail-like shapes that mimic the way the aurora borealis waves across the sky.

Opening for this final night of the European leg of Aoba's Across the Oceans Tour was Iceland's own featherlight folk singer Ólöf Arnalds, whose birdlike high tones remain as cozy as a quilt of down. Her appearance here is no accident of geography either; Aoba later stated that Arnalds' most recent album Spíra is one she often listens to as she goes to sleep. With just an acoustic guitar and a too-brief handful of songs, including old favorites like "Innundir Skinni" and "Call It What You Want," she was effortlessly soothing, and a perfect match for Aoba's own enveloping aura.

When Aoba recently headlined at London's Royal Albert Hall, she was joined by Taro Umebayashi – one of her closest collaborators on 2020's Windswept Adan and last year's Luminescent Creatures – and string players 12 Ensemble, but Across The Oceans is, for the most part, a totally solo affair. When she entered stage right at Harpa, she came alone, stepping onto a stage that was arranged like a self-contained interior room: a guitar and chair at the center, a keyboard to her right, an upright piano to her left, and behind her a table of plants that's flanked by two lamps, one draped in a fishing net to really underline the tour's aquatic theme.

For the first half of the concert Aoba used only her acoustic guitar, breathing sweet life into songs like 2021's "Asleep Among Endives," a cover of Ryūichi Sakamoto's "Kyoto" (which she has claimed more than once as the song she loves most in the world), and the perfectly titled "Dawn in the Adan," which really does evoke a sense of something ancient and unhurried rising into view.

Listening to Aoba sing feels a bit like following a line drawn across a perfectly calm sea, carefully displacing the stillness as if persuading it gently to remember its own movement. There's no real sense of force involved, just a way of inflection that's clear but unassertive, never leaning into drama or weight. Not, that is, until she turned to pick up an electric guitar and delivered a jawdroppingly different version of "FLAG" that brought the show briefly into sharper relief. It's not that it ruptured the stillness exactlyz but I do get a sense of pressurization, as if the gentle current we'd followed so far had suddenly been poured into a different kind of vessel, tighter and less airy, where tones that seemed to dissolve almost without friction on Luminescent Creatures are given a new kind of edge, a surprising, metallic insistence.

Everything settled back into its rightful place thereafter with Luminescent Creatures closing track "惑星の泪 (Wakusei No Namida)," a song she describes as "a last goodbye to Earth." Later, at the piano, she pulled out the French version of "Seabed Eden" as a welcome surprise, but it was her virtuoso rendition of the epic, multi-movement "機械仕掛乃宇宙" ("Clockwork Universe") that left me most stunned.

Above the stage, lights formed the shape of a lotus flower, which can perhaps be read in spiritual terms as a symbol of transcendence, or simply as an emblem of what the evening had been doing all along: songs emerging from and returning to the "water" of Aoba's ever fluid, ceaselessly musical world.

The Across The Oceans Tour continues into North America from Friday, April 24.