Digital music producer and DJ Jennifer Lee — aka TOKiMONSTA.
Nolwen Cifuentes for NPR
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Nolwen Cifuentes for NPR
Jennifer Lee has been hanging out in Koreatown since she was a child. Her household would drive up from the suburbs south of Los Angeles to eat on the eating places or to buy on the Koreatown Plaza, a 3-story mall the place the meals court docket options dishes like kimbap and soondae.
Okay-City is like its personal metropolis inside the metropolis of LA, and that is the place Lee advised assembly All Issues Thought-about for our interview. As we stroll down Western Avenue, one of many neighborhood’s foremost thoroughfares, Lee factors out a movie show — the place locals can watch mainstream movies with Korean subtitles — and the hovering turquoise facade of The Wiltern, an art-deco-style theater.
“It is stunning, it is a lot part of my childhood, like even my mother is aware of what The Wiltern is. She would not know what occurs inside it (although),” she laughs.
Lee, who performs because the digital artist TOKiMONSTA, has graced the venue’s stage a number of occasions, however as she gazes at The Wiltern’s ornate partitions, she says taking part in there wasn’t one thing she ever imagined as a toddler.
“Once I was youthful, I did not aspire to be a musician. I feel rising up in an immigrant household, there was no time limit the place being a musician was laid out for me as a chance.”
That unfathomable dream has now turn out to be a profession that is spanned greater than 15 years. Her new album, Everlasting Reverie, is her fifth full-length launch. Everlasting Reverie marks Lee’s first album in 5 years, and he or she says she intentionally carved out time to make it. She stopped touring. And he or she tried to recapture her early spirit as a music maker, at a time when she was creating beats with out the stress of album gross sales, photograph shoots and excursions.
“One in all my fears, as soon as I began doing music full time, is to turn out to be resentful of music — the factor I really like probably the most,” Lee says. “I felt that feeling of discomfort form of rising in me, this ‘Oh man I received to do that or I’ve to try this’ and never like, ‘Oh, I received to make beats as we speak. What a present.’ “
So this album, Lee says, is a celebration of the dreamer she was when she was youthful. The dreamer who by no means imagined taking part in The Wiltern. The artistic spirit who was so enthusiastic about what the longer term held and its infinite potentialities.
“You understand, life is difficult. Life is difficult for all of us. But it surely does not imply that little dreamer inside you has to go away.”
Lee stands exterior of Love Hour in Koreatown.
Nolwen Cifuentes for NPR
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Nolwen Cifuentes for NPR
Lee has had her share of life challenges over the past decade. In 2015, she was identified with a uncommon and probably lethal mind illness known as Moyamoya. She had two back-to-back surgical procedures, only a week aside, in an try to save lots of her life. The surgical procedures have been profitable, however they left her in extreme ache — and for a time — with out the flexibility to stroll or carry out fundamental motor capabilities. She could not converse or perceive language. When individuals spoke, she says, it sounded just like the characters on Peanuts. Past that, she could not hearken to music — it appeared like metallic, crunchy noise – and he or she had misplaced the flexibility to compose music, too.
“It was laborious. We use music as a therapeutic instrument,” she says. “And at that second, after I wanted music most, I didn’t have the flexibility to faucet into that. I simply sat in noise and silence. I had a lot recuperating I needed to do.”
She slowly regained the flexibility to know speech. Then her vocabulary started coming again, however music nonetheless felt out of attain. Slowly and regularly, she began to listen to melodies once more — “flowers showing in a useless area” and the crunchy sounds she’d been listening to softened into one thing extra musical.
Finally, she tried opening her laptop computer once more to write down music. However she says nothing musical got here out – all the things sounded harsh and peculiar.
“I needed to then perceive that the creation of music can also be a special a part of my mind that had not been repaired but,” she recollects. “Music is my life. It is my profession. I feel with the ability to hear it once more was nice, however figuring out that making it was not within the playing cards for me was one thing that was extremely discouraging. So I closed my laptop computer, put it away and determined I’ll deal with this later.”
A few weeks later, she picked up her laptop computer once more. And this time, she ended up with one thing stunning: a music titled, “I Want I Might,” which appeared on her 2017 album, Lune Rouge.
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“My love letter to my pal”
Simply up Western Avenue from The Wiltern, there is a small car parking zone ringed by Korean pubs and a soft-serve ice cream store. Tucked away within the again is a smash burger place known as Love Hour, co-owned by Lee’s pal Jimmy Han. “He is a tiny bit older than me, so in Korean we would say he is form of like ‘oppa (older brother),’ ” she says.
They met across the time Lee’s profession was simply getting began, and when she performed Coachella in 2022, he offered a particular “TOKiMONSTA meal” on the pageant: a Past burger with American cheese, lettuce, tomato, caramelized onion and “love sauce,” with a facet of seasoned curly fries and kimchi cream sauce.
She says her namesake burger had offered out by the point she completed her set that day, however she’s had loads of different alternatives to eat the burgers right here. “I had my birthday out on this patio,” Lee says. “And I ate like three of them. I’m always researching his burgers and consuming them.”
Lee’s community of long-lasting friendships comes up loads throughout our dialog on that patio – from Han, to the school pal who launched her to the beatmaking scene in LA.
But it surely’s one other pal, Regina Biondo, who’s on the middle of the story of her new album, Everlasting Reverie.
Lee describes Biondo as greater than a detailed pal – extra like a sister, she says. Biondo designed Lee’s web site, managed a few of her excursions, and influenced TOKiMONSTA’s music, too. Lee recollects the time she performed a pageant in Sao Paulo, Brazil, and as they explored the town, Biondo identified a man promoting information on the road. A kind of information finally grew to become the vocal pattern on the Everlasting Reverie monitor “Corazón / Demise By Disco Pt 2.”
As Lee was ending work on the album final yr, Biondo realized she had most cancers. Then, simply months earlier than Lee’s album launch and scheduled tour, Biondo’s most cancers worsened and he or she was admitted to the hospital. Lee canceled the album launch and the tour, to be at Biondo’s facet throughout her closing days in hospice, writing to her followers: “What I am coping with proper now feels extra emotionally taxing and troublesome than something I’ve confronted earlier than, much more so than my journey by way of Moyamoya mind surgical procedure.”
Biondo died in October, at 42, and Lee says she’s nonetheless very a lot grieving her pal’s dying as she launches this album – an album that is infused with Biondo’s affect. Lee factors to the monitor “For You.”
“I really feel like ‘For You’ is the epitome of what Regina liked in my music,” Lee says. “That is the one the place I used to be like, ‘That is my love letter to my pal.’ And it has been actually troublesome to undergo this launch course of as a result of I do have to speak about her loads.”
At one level, Lee thought-about not releasing the album in any respect, because it was a reminder of a painful yr in her life. However Lee says she hopes placing it out into the world might be a journey by way of grief, studying and self-awareness. And although speaking about Biondo has been more durable than she imagined, it is also a option to honor her and share how particular she was.
“It is part of the story of this album and it actually sucks to speak about somebody that you’ve got misplaced,” Lee says. “And it is also vital, as a result of everybody suffers in numerous methods, however we have to see examples of extra individuals struggling and blossoming.”
