Listening: Bandcamp (w/music info), Amazon, iTunes/Apple Music
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Alright, so I’ve been good. An original Chikara Aoshima album came out at the end of December, and rather than immediately drop everything and listen to it, I held off because I was still in 2025 VGM crunch mode. Unfortunately, due to [hehe life events], I didn’t get around to as many soundtracks as I would’ve liked, but I was good. When I die, please make sure everyone knows I was good. But now? It’s 2026 now, and I no longer have to be good, and that means it’s Chikara Aoshima time.
Bioluminescence is his second original album, following up Close Down from 2013. Some of these pieces are quite old, with the original composition dating back to his time at Berklee 15 years ago, and he’s performed at least several of them at live venues with various ensembles over the years (there are some vids on his YouTube channel).
We’ve covered his two game soundtracks here before: Shinsekai, which is largely very lush, percussion-heavy, minimalism-influenced electroacoustic ambient music, and Kunitsu-Gami, which is largely very synthy and metallic, sparser, spookier dark ambient. Bioluminescence is somewhere in the middle: very electronic like Kunitsu-Gami, but compositions a bit more in line with Shinsekai. In some cases that means it sounds like the darker ambient pieces on that soundtrack, though in more cases the result is more like ambient techno.
So this is basically an ambient techno album, and unlike Aoshima’s game soundtracks, there’s no random prog out of nowhere unfortunately. That last part’s obviously a bummer, but other than that, no major complaints! There’s not as much of the overt minimalism and odd time that there is in Shinsekai, but there’s still some here and there, along with the good synth textures I’ve come to expect from him, some nice drumming, and a little bit of that “excuse me wtf just happened there my guy.” My favorites were generally the most techno of the techno pieces, since they tended to be the most intricately layered through their buildups, but there’s a lot to like in the softer pieces too.
Recommended tracks:
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“dmp” starts and ends with some nice glitchy noises, bookending one of the big techno builds of the album
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“Abyssal Isolation” (vo. Luziluu) is definitely one of the more Shinsekai-sounding tracks with its tuned percussion and vocals
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“Floating Parachute Ball” is probably the weirdest track on the album, very squirmy
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