TOKiMONSTA

As the clock strikes twelve on what has been a typically wet, March day in brooding, grey London, Jennifer ‘TOKiMONSTA’ Lee collapses onto one of the many sofas backstage at Whitechapel’s Rhythm Factory and lets it slowly envelop her. “I’m SO tired right now,” she laughs to Brainer, having just finished what was, frankly, a storming set. Onstage, the mighty Nosaj Thing proceeds to blow the Thursday night crowd clean away with his haunting, electric sorcery.

Really, the fatigue isn’t particularly surprising. Midway through a tour of Europe taking in Bruges (“it’s so beautiful I actually bought a tourist t-shirt!”), Amsterdam, Leeds, London, Nijmegen and Utrecht, barely a week ago the Los Angeles-born Korean was back here in London as one of the select few chosen to attend the prestigious, but rigorous Red Bull Music Academy for the two weeks of its second term. “Half my crew has been involved with it: FlyLo, Samiyam, Teebs, and a lot of people that are good friends of our crew like Hudson Mohawke and Dorian Concept – everyone has come out of it,” says the Brainfeeder member in her lilting, Californian accent. “I thought, you know, it’s a good opportunity to explore different options. No-one else out of L.A. got in, in my term at least. It was highly competitive and I felt really blessed – I really appreciated the fact that there was something that made them choose me versus the gazillion people from L.A. that I know applied.”

Already the consummate beatmaker, Toki’s stint at this year’s Academy has nevertheless taught her a fair bit. “We had tutorials with Russell Elevado, who engineered ‘Voodoo’ by D’Angelo,” she recalls. “He went into this whole thing about using analogue outboard mixers, and now I want one of those! I think the experience is really going to expand my music, not necessarily change the way I think about it, but definitely broaden the technical aspects of it.”

The evolution of TOKiMONSTA continues then, complete with guest spots on Mary Anne Hobbs and Gilles Peterson, and all with nary an album release in sight. But Brainer wonders how it all started. “It was really silly. I’ve always been a purveyor of music and always loved immersing myself in different music,” says the completely amicable Lee. “Where I grew up, I lived in a very upper middle class, right-by-the-beach environment with a lot of people listening to Green Day and John Mayer, that kind of stuff. I independently subjected myself to hip-hop and underground hip-hop and when I was in college, I was going to a lot of hip-hop shows or rock shows. I was a show whore! I loved collecting music, and a friend of mine said, ‘oh you know, you should try making beats’.” At nineteen years old, what started off as a whimsical foray into beat making turned into a short EP with Bay Area rapper Shing02 (widely known for his work with ambient jazz-hop master Nujabes, who recently passed away). Introduced to each other by a mutual friend, Toki’s reputation steadily grew, and if it weren’t for instant message client iChat, she would never have become part of the Brainfeeder family. God bless Steve Jobs. “I had an iChat status update that said ‘which label should I choose’, and Steve (Flying Lotus) IMed me saying ‘join Brainfeeder’. I was like, alright,” she says breezily. “It was super casual.”