MUSIC INTERVIEWS Jennifer Lee’s production on Oasis Nocturno, the new album from her project TOKiMONSTA, exemplifies this notion unlike any other. Across its twelve track runtime, the record ebbs between immersive, psychedelic hip-hop beats and brooding electronica while maintaining a concise, oddly upbeat edge. Lee’s style is colourful, and it’s clear she committed more time to honing the palate of sounds this time around. ”I definitely had more of a vision. I wanted to create an album with more of a straightforward story to take me away to a different place,” Lee says. She notes that her underlying vision of Oasis Nocturno saw her dedicate much more finesse and detail to end up with a final product that reflected her initial ambition for the project. “I wanted the track listing to be a lot more concise and the mix between songs more similar throughout. I wanted a stronger thread through the album.”
Inside TOKiMONSTA’s Creative Oasis Any musician can attest to the fact that their experiences are intertwined within the music they create. The most mundane mishaps can be carved into the most important melodies, and even without lyrics, these songs can carry the most potent of messages stemming from the experiences of their creator.
On top of a tracklist that utilises the talents of EARTHGANG and VanJess to shape the album’s narrative, Lee also mentions the role of modular synthesis in shaping the overall tone of Oasis Nocturno. The janky ‘Renter’s Anthem’ is a direct product of knob tweaking, and several other tracks across the record are speckled and affected with modular bloops and drones. “I got really into the whole modular thing. You can hear it all over this album,” Lee says. “Whether it’s just little arpeggios or sound effects, or even just digital signal processing for crazy textures. I didn’t want to be too heavy handed with it because they can get really alien and weird, but I wanted to make it as musical as possible by assembling little modules to make sounds that no one else can have but you.” Rising to prominence in the LA beatmaking scene in LA alongside the likes of Flying Lotus and Shlohmo, TOKiMONSTA has always had a knack for making a beat knock - deep kicks and whiplash snares are a speciality of Lee’s. However, it seemed like the rest of the world didn’t catch onto her craft till the release of 2017’s Lune Rouge - the first full-length released by Lee after a life-saving brain operation almost nullified her ability to understand music.
“It’s been five or six years since I did it last. I am excited to talk about it, and sometimes it helps me think about it all.” Written during an overtly chaotic period in his personal life, Suddenly is like The Life Of Pablo for the introverts: while jam-packed with classic Caribou colour and flair, it’s also an extremely emotional and disjointed feeling release. Every song constantly jolts between sounds and ideas like a manic sketchpad of sorts, with Snaith confessing he adopted a much more laissez faire approach to crafting the LP. “Our Love had quite a coherent sound. It was probably the most polished, concise, maybe pop conception of my music without comprising anything too much,” Snaith says. “With this record, I didn’t think I could push that idea any further in that direction, so I’m did the opposite and let the eccentricities and idiosyncrasies about the way I make music flow and just emphasise those things.”
Caribou Seeks Peace Amidst The Chaos “I like talking to people,” Dan Snaith says over the phone from his studio in London. The celebrated Canadian producer hasn’t had to endure the wringer of a press cycle since the release of the last Caribou record Our Love in 2014, and he assures me that he’s got a much more on his mind this time around.
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In that sense, Suddenly could be one of the most scatterbrained projects of the year. One minute Snaith is dropping dancefloor ready stompers like ‘Never Come Back’ and ‘Ravi’, the next he’s channeling Madlib or the RZA to create chopped and slopped hip-hop on ‘Sunny’s Time’ and ‘New Jade’. Modular synths pepper various tracks across its run time, he refers to ‘Like I Love You’ as his ‘Red Hot Chili Peppers ballad’, and the unadulterated Gloria Barnes sample that surges through ‘Home’ might just make for the most unpredictable Caribou moment to date. “I’ve made a lot of albums that reference the past, but on Suddenly I realised that I wanted to engage with the music right now - not that I’m chasing trends or anything like that. But when I hear something exciting that’s resonating in our culture, that’s exciting to me, and I really want to contribute to that.” It’s not just the music of Suddenly that makes it an intense listening experience. Suddenly is easily Snaith’s most lyrical album to date: instead of being buried in textures, Snaith’s voice is mixed to the forefront for the entirety of the record as he attempts to come to terms with the calamities that befell those around him.
“The headspace was completely different,” says Lee of the two albums. “I created Oasis Nocturno knowing I’d already written Lune Rouge and established my ‘post-surgery voice’ in terms of everything I’d gone through. “It was a celebration of being alive and being like ‘You know what guys? I’m just going to make whatever the fuck I want to, because I get to live another day on this planet and I don’t want to waste my time doing anything other than what I want.’ Both of them were natural, but I think this one had a lot more of an intention behind it.” It’s obvious that Lee’s lust for life infects all aspects of her thought process behind making music. Despite the success of her treatment, she’s still incredibly aware of her condition - (Moyamoya, a rare affliction that limits blood-flow to the brain) and the realities it holds in the grander scheme of things. “I feel like it’s still not really in the past. In many ways, the vast majority of people are probably even more curious this time around,” she predicts. “There’ll be tonnes of people who didn’t know me back then and who will go back and be like ‘oh she went thought this thing’. I get people hit me up on the internet saying they wish me well, even though it happened at the end of 2015. “To be technically correct, I still have the disease – I always have to be positive about it. For the rest of my life I still have things that are involved with the condition. As far as the pressure from that, I’ve already created my celebratory album, but that story doesn’t go away. I just get to explore another one with this album.” BY WILL BREWSTER Oasis Nocturno, the new album from TOKiMONSTA, arrives on Friday March 20 via TOKiMONSTA Music.
“I had a lot more to say this time around,” Snaith acknowledges, explaining that the title of the record hints to both these events and the jagged sonic vessels that carry their stories. “In the last five years of my life, there’s been a lot of quite tragic, dislocating events that came out of the blue and changed everything in an instant. I hadn’t experienced like that in my life before: there were all these things I wasn’t planning for, and my musical life is intertwined with that. I can’t be in the midst of those things and then go and write something whimsical and made up and unrelated.” Despite this turmoil, Suddenly never delves into darkened territory. The ruddy glow you’d expect to find in a Caribou record still imbues the project in its full – album highlight ‘Ravi’ gleams like light upon water, while early singles ‘You and I’ and ‘Home’ blanket the listener in a gentle warmth. Snaith says that he finds it reassuring to listen back to the album and hear such a comforting response to the events that affected his loved ones so deeply. “I was usually the person there around those people being reassuring and comforting. But it’s also there in the music because the music is doing that for me,” he says. “Even if I’m not the central character in these events, they still took an emotional toll on me, and being able to process that and filter it through a lens to get through those emotions out. This music is like a journal or photo album. I like that it’s there alongside my life in the same place and time: it makes sense to me.” BY WILL BREWSTER
Suddenly arrives via City Slang/ Inertia on Friday February 28.
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