(electronic music)
- When I went through the surgery for Moyamoya,
I didn't tell anyone. (bright music)
It was a very difficult time for me.
(electronic music)
I had to write down what would happen
to all my things if I were to die.
(electronic music)
I think when you're faced with your own mortality,
you wanna make sure that you lived your life
how you wanted to live it.
I just wanna keep making the most amazing music
and showing people that if I can do it, anyone can do it.
(electronic music)
(upbeat music)
My name is Jennifer Lee, but I'm better known
as TOKiMONSTA. ♪ Show me ♪
♪ Where the light stays ♪
♪ Find it on the path ♪ I am a music producer
and live performer DJ, and all the songs are composed by me.
Electronic music is the music producer's world.
It is what you can do to push the envelope.
♪ I ♪ My music is electronic.
♪ In your feelings ♪
But is has many organic sounds, like a piano,
or a violin. How you guys doing?
Going a step further beyond that is creating instruments
out of non-instruments. ("Rouge" by Tokimonsta)
So something that I like to do is use field recordings.
(bright music)
I take a little recorder around with me
and record different kinds of sounds that I like.
(helicopter roars) (bright music)
I can use little bits of that to create new sounds.
(bright music) (sticks click)
(foot scoffs) (bright music)
(rock dings) (bright music)
They do have a really interesting tonality
that is not common in music. (bright music)
This is my song, "Rose's Thorn."
It is a track off my most recent album, Lune Rouge.
("Rose's Thorn" by Tokimonsta)
With this track, I did use a lot of field recordings.
For the drum sounds, I decided to use a truck door.
(truck door slams)
Rocks hitting each other. (rocks click)
And a regular snare drum. (snare drum clacks)
I layered them all on top of each other.
Together, we have--
(percussion clacks)
And the great thing is when you do stuff like that,
no one else will have that sound.
No one else will have a snare-truck-door-rock sound
in their song. (upbeat percussion music)
They're unusual sounds,
things that are not considered music.
I recorded
this wonderful beach sound. (ocean waves gush)
That like weird, bird chirping.
(birds chirp)
There is something to me about creating an environment
in a song, it takes you somewhere else,
beyond just the song and the melodies,
you're actually removing someone from their environment
and putting them by the sea, putting them in nature.
(ocean waves gush)
(bright music)
I was raised in Torrance, California.
I was born to an immigrant mother.
My father passed away when I was very young,
so for the most part, I was raised by a single mother
who worked very hard to kind of provide for me.
So I took piano for about 10 years,
and my upbringing introduced me to music.
Though, I don't think my mom intended for me
to become a musician. (upbeat music)
I remember
discovering
west coast hip-hop, everything about it
was something that appealed to me a lot,
and I flourished in that. (upbeat music)
I would start producing once I entered college.
Even though I loved hip-hop, I had no access to rappers
when I was starting out, so the music started
to become hip-hop beats but with electronic sounds in it.
No one had heard this style of music
that was so much hip-hop but was so forward thinking
and electronic. I started participating
in other events with other producers.
And I became apart of a scene.
(upbeat percussion music)
That itself could almost just be like a rap beat.
The drums themselves are just so simple
without anything else, that's why I find it.
Percussion is very important.
I think it creates movement. (upbeat percussion music)
Even the pianos, the main thing is that there's movement.
(upbeat music)
That bass sound is very simple.
All it is is one note. (upbeat music)
Rhythm guitar. (upbeat music)
The guitar lead. (upbeat music)
They are not coming from a real guitar.
I was going for a non-realistic guitar sound.
I made this song like right after my surgery.
It was one of the first songs that I worked on.
(dramatic, atmospheric music)
Around 10 years ago, I started getting migraines.
One doctor suggested that I potentially could have a disease
called Moyamoya, the arteries in the left
and right side that supply blood to your brain
start to shrink, and then, so what ends up happening
is stroke, aneurism, you will die.
Fast forward about 10 years later,
I had a strange incident where I couldn't feel my left foot.
In the back of my head,
I've always had that Moyamoya thing there.
By January of 2015, I had two brain surgeries
a week apart from each other.
(dramatic, atmospheric music)
Right after the surgery, I was tired and in pain,
but I was OK.
It was the recovery process that was difficult.
I would get stroke symptoms where I couldn't feel
the entire left side of my body and, just out of nowhere,
I completely lost my ability to talk
and to understand speech.
And I could no longer communicate with anyone,
and one thing that I noticed about this entire process
was I couldn't understand music anymore.
It's nothing but noise.
Like an airplane flying in the sky.
(airplane roars) I couldn't understand music,
so there was no music anymore.
That was very difficult for me.
(uplifting music)
Eventually, I noticed that the language was getting
a little better, day by day.
A soundtrack was coming back, all the music
that you hear, in the elevator, out of people's cars,
on TV-- - Understanding--
- All these things were slowly creeping back into my life,
and I was elated. (bright music)
- Hi. - Hey.
You look good. - How's it going?
- [Tokimonsta] Good.
- [Ioanna] What are you doing today?
- So this is what I have up right now.
These are all from the same take,
but I had to mix them all differently
'cause depending on what note you sing,
those frequencies would jump out more.
When I went to open my computer to be like,
"OK, this is the time, it's my time to shine.
"I'm gonna try making a new song."
It was awful, it was garbage, it didn't sound good at all.
I didn't know how to make music anymore.
I figured if everything else came back,
this would come back. - Let's try re-recording
one of your leads for our song.
- Cool. - And see if we can
like breathe in some new life. - Sounds good.
- I'm gonna start from the-- - People think I had
to relearn how to make music; I didn't have to relearn it.
I just had to wait for it to come back.
- [Ioanna] But I'll play like a couple bars
before it goes in. - Fast forward
just like a week or two weeks, I was able to make
the very first song that ended up on my most recent album.
Cool!
That was great. - Cool!
- What a great recording.
Another element of the song are these little vocal samples.
They are not words, they don't mean anything.
It's just effects.
(singers scat)
It is having the beauty
of a person's voice
without them distracting you with words,
and these songs essentially make themselves.
And, even I'm surprised at the end how they come to feel.
Like I had no idea I'd end up making a song like this.
For me, as a musician, I always wanna innovate.
I don't wanna be making the same type of music
as everyone else, 'cause then, why would people
need to listen to my music? ("Rose's Thorn" by Tokimonsta)
After the brain surgery, the one thing that changed
was my philosophical approach.
Once you're faced with the fact that you might die,
you realize, I don't wanna live my life
for anyone else but myself.
I wanna be the kind of artist that creates her own vision
for herself, no matter what it is that I do.
And I wanna know that each day I live, I feel fulfilled.
("Rose's Thorn" by Tokimonsta)