In support of the release of her debut LP, ‘FEMINISTA’ and new EP, ‘Luv & Vibes’, California-based producer Tomu DJ has shared an exclusive mix for HITCHER which features all original music alongside a bunch of unreleased tracks.
Tracklist:
Tomu DJ – Unreleased
Tomu DJ – Unreleased
Tomu DJ – I Love New York
Tomu DJ – Unreleased
Tomu DJ – Goes To Bossa During Covid Once (ft. Darian)
Tomu DJ & kimdollars1 – Summer Thing
Tomu DJ – Nectarine
Tomu DJ – Unreleased
Tomu DJ – Zaza
Tomu DJ – gold4salt
Tomu DJ – Optimistic (ft. kimdollars1)
Tomu DJ was driving down the freeway in California in 2019 when her tire blew out, flipping her car three times, shattering the windshield and leaving her in fear for her life. Although she walked away without major physical injuries, the accident was scarring and eventually led to a period of psychosis. Tomu turned to music to regain a sense of self. After a series of EPs, in August of 2021 she released her debut LP, ‘FEMINISTA’, to critical acclaim.
Tomu draws inspiration from her inner self, her memories and her past, seamlessly infusing these reflections into her music. The record is a representation of her musical journey and sits somewhere in between ambient, downtempo house and techno.
We spoke to Tomu DJ about her journey and what has brought her to this stage in her life in the interview below:
So let’s start from the beginning – where did music start for you? When was the beginning of your musical journey? Did you play music as a kid? What are your earliest musical memories?
I would do some music in school, but when I grew up I was mostly a rock fan and listened to a lot of hip-hop. There wasn’t really that much electronic music for me until I got a little bit older. I feel like the first time I started messing around with music myself was when I got an Ableton demo, when I was like 17 or 18. And then it was around that time that I started getting into footwork music.
When I was 20 I started DJing, and I would make mostly the music I listened to. Footwork especially, but I just didn’t feel a need to make my own music. During the pandemic when DJing was just not a thing at all, I really started to take it a lot more seriously and decided to make original music the main thing for me.
So footwork was your early electronic love…
Yeah, it was the first time that a genre/musical movement was something that I was interested in engrossing myself in, and learning about the cultural context and everything that went into the music. Most of the parties that I did in college were with members of TekLife, and people kinda adjacent to that scene, so I got to learn a lot about it.
What were the things that attracted you to it? Was it things in the music? Or you said things about the culture?
Initially, I think it was just the vocal sampling. I’d heard songs with vocal sampling before, but it was never in the way that it was in a lot of the footwork tracks I heard around that time, where it was like rapid fire phonetics, deriving new meaning out of samples and using them as percussive elements to add new layers. Manipulating the material to make new stuff was very interesting to me, and also the high tempo was very alluring, because I’d never heard anything like that.
It’s also so deeply rooted in black music. Not only house music, where it obviously develops from, but also r&b and hip-hop. Even when I DJ now, footwork blends very well with hip-hop and r&b edits and tracks. It’s one of the most diverse genres I’ve heard, and has also spread internationally to, you know, Japan and the UK. It’s very diverse while staying in the same general mould, I guess.
Yeah it is. One of your mixes on the internet somewhere – I’m not sure which one – there were two footwork tracks you chose. And they weren’t just bangers, they were very melodic.
I remember that one, I did it for NZ Friendly Potential Radio.
That’s it. The two footworks tracks in there aren’t bangers – they’re very melodic, and kind of absurd. I guess just ‘different’, in a way that reminded me of your music. Is that what you mean, the ‘diversity of footwork’?
Yeah definitely. I feel like as the genre has moved on and become more splintered, there’s a lot of people from different producer backgrounds trying their hand, which is creating some more experimental melodic stuff. I also wouldn’t consider the music I make now to be footwork, although it is heavily inspired by that.
I feel like it’s one of the most impactful musical movements in the last few years, just in how much of an effect it’s had on newer, smaller producers to make all kinds of really weird, cool, even ambient stuff.
For sure. Your earliest productions on BandCamp are from the beginning of this year, is that right?
Yeah. I mean I had a couple of edits and mixtapes floating around, but I’ve taken them down. I would say that I first started releasing original music around like March 2020, when I put out an EP on my friend’s label Slime Death Records, called ‘Near Death Experience’, which I made in the aftermath of my near death experience, where I had this crazy car crash. A lot of ongoing changes to my life resulted from that.
Since then I’ve basically been making music constantly. When I lived in NYC for a year, I was constantly making dance tracks and ambient [tracks] too. That’s where ‘FEMINISTA’ was made, and that’s where my new EP, ‘Luv & Vibes’, that just came out with my friend Kim, was made. Now I’m back home in the Bay Area, kinda just working on refining my sound a little bit more before doing any more major releases. We have a couple of labels we’re talking to about doing some projects, but I’m just trying to slow down and take my time with whatever comes out next, because I know there’s been a lot of music coming from me in just the past year alone.
Do you have an idea of the direction you want to go, or are you just more experimenting at the moment?
There’s a bunch of different things I’ve been trying out. One avenue I’ve been exploring a lot is – I realised a while ago and you’ll hear this on my record ‘Luv & Vibes’ – if you put distortion on a certain sounding synth, it’s going to sound just like a guitar. What people hear on records that are more black metal or alt-rock – bands like Built To Spill and shoe-gaze bands like My Bloody Valentine – a lot of that guitar sound is mostly just distortion. So when you play around with distortion on synths it creates stuff that sounds very much like guitars.
Of course, very experienced guitarists can do a lot of crazy stuff with a guitar, but when you control the synth parameters and add some distortion, you can create some really cool guitar-like, rock, dreamy, shoe-gaze sounds. I’m trying to experiment with that further to see where I can go with it.
I’m trying to work on more house tunes as well. I’ve been trying to work on this house project for over a year but a lot of it has kind of come out on different projects. I think a lot of people expected a more house or club-techno influenced album from me, but ‘FEMINISTA’ wasn’t, so I’m trying to explore both sides basically – a more rock-influenced follow up to the previous album, and then some more party, house music that is very listenable to fans of electronic music.
Who are some of your favourite house producers? At the moment, or in the past?
At the moment – I mean it’s not house – but I’ve been listening to Jeff Mills a lot. And CL has been an inspiration of mine recently. Chris Jones, of course. I really liked Park Hye Jin’s album. I like Traxman a lot. The new Black Rave Culture tape is pretty cool.
And also a ton of DJ Sprinkles. She’s an artist that lives in Japan but I think she’s American. She’s made a lot of really influential ambient music and deep house. Her album Midtown 120 Blues was a super famous deep house album that was very highly praised, and she has a very extensive background as an activist as well. Just lots of varied materials of writings and music, just a super prolific artist. I’ve definitely been listening to her stuff a lot.
Another producer I’ve liked recently is Amazondotcom.
On the album ‘FEMINISTA’, the footwork influence is clear, and you mentioned the rock influence. It’s also a super, super gentle, kind of ‘open’ album. I think there’s something in your music that’s vulnerable. Where does that come from?
I think for myself and a lot of people, the past two years have been very weird and a kind of resetting period. This whole pandemic shit coincided with my accident, and me just undergoing a lot of changes in my life. I think the place that the album came from was very personal, and was very inspired by me trying to come to a clearer picture of who I am, after having lost a sense of that following the accident.
I have been trying to make that album since June of last year, and it took the entire year to be finished. I think the songs that did make it onto the final project are the ones that I would find myself going back to and listening to. The album went through several iterations when I was making it, and I would often just put it on while I was going to sleep, and the most relaxing and pastoral sounding songs are the ones that ended up making it onto the project. Which I think says a lot about me as a person, and the things that bring me peace. I think a lot of reviewers of the album caught on to that.
I think so. I think that’s why people love your music, or connect to the music. It’s something with that peacefulness which is on another level.
Thank you. I think that’s why the album didn’t end up being very club appropriate. You know, I love the club, and I love DJing, but the songs for this album came from a very amorphous picture of how I came to be at this point in life.
So the album took a year. Do you slave over the details in the productions a lot?
I think for every single one of them, they were like 90% done within one studio session, but then there’s a longer process. Some of my favourite songs on the album, like ‘Rock69’ – me and my friend Kim made that in her living room, just passing the laptop back and forth for like an hour. ‘CONFUNDIDA’ I think I made in like 30 minutes during a studio session, but a lot of the songs that made it onto the other projects I put out last year, took a lot longer to do.
Sometimes I’ll take much longer with details for my production, but going for the peaceful and centering theme of the record, I didn’t feel it was so necessary this time. I still worked for a long time on samples, melodies and drums to make it sound better, but most of them were mostly made in quick sessions and then revisited over the next few months.
The process itself – it doesn’t sound like it’s hard, listening to your music. It sounds like it’s very natural. And hearing you talk about it, it sounds like it’s natural: you made a song in half an hour, you made a song in an hour. Do you find it challenging producing music?
Definitely, yeah. I love doing it of course, but sometimes – because ideas will flow so fast for me – I get to a point when it’s like nothing is really coming up, and I’ll still make songs fast, but they just suck or I don’t like them. At this point, after I’ve gotten this album out, I expressed myself the way I wanted to at the time, and now I’m more focused on refining my sounds, refining my craft. Kind of doing more complicated arrangements.
I think my goal with releasing the first album is to have something to compare my future music to, and wanting it to be different from that. Not necessarily more complex, but different while still maintaining a lot of the same motifs.
There was one other thing I wanted to ask you. That’s that in the Pitchfork review of ‘FEMINISTA’, it says that Janet Jackson’s ‘The Velvet Rope’ – that’s the biggest influence for ‘FEMINSTA’?
Yeah, well for a certain time I was just listening to that album every day, and got super obsessed with it. I cannot make music like that [laughs], but I think one of the things that really drew me to that album is how there’s an overarching theme to it, but it’s hard to distill it into one sentence. It’s like an album that keeps on giving, and that’s kind of what I’ve set out to do – make something that’s very smooth and gentle, but also intricate and inspiring.
While my album doesn’t sound anything like that album, the philosophy that I had going into it – that helped me curate the final selection – was very much influenced by that record. It’s kind of an all encompassing record about the human experience, that puts together a lot of different influences. I don’t have those skills to make an album like [The Velvet Rope], but as far as making an album a cohesive project – and not just keep doing EPs – that was kind of my inspiration behind it.
And is there something like that for this new EP? Something in particular that you’re going for, something that inspired you in particular?
The new EP – a lot of the songs were supposed to be, and considered to be on ‘FEMINSTA’, most of them. I think there’s one song that we made back in December or something, and then finished after ‘FEMINSTA’ had came out. And then the other three songs were made around the same time as ‘FEMINSTA’ too.
I guess the theme it is very melodic, just like ‘FEMINISTA’, but a little more in your face, a little less ambient. It was sort of like Kim and I inspiring each other for this one, and it was inspired by our friendship.
Is there anything else you’d like to add?
We’re going on tour this month in America, the EP is coming out. Hopefully around March in Berlin in Europe. It’s been very heartening to see that my music is being picked up over in Europe, because that’s really crazy to me [laughs]. Thanks so much!
Interview by Frank Dasent
