Tomu DJ (Interview)
Today we’re listening to Tomu DJ, an American electronic musician and pianist from the Bay Area. We first recommended her music back in 2021. She grew up playing piano – mostly improvising after a short stint with lessons – and then starting producing in Ableton, inspired by DJ Rashad and others. She started putting out electronic music in 2020, and her debut LP FEMINISTA released the following year. The footwork influence is audible in its fast-paced percussion, which accompanies tender synth loops. Her latest record, antagonist, is different, recorded entirely on a Roland FP-7F. Its tracks are “raw conversations with myself depicted through a digital piano,” she told us. A conversation with Tomu follows the streaming links.
antagonist - Tomu DJ (43m, no vocals)
Spotify / Apple Music / YouTube Music / Amazon Music / Bandcamp / Tidal
FEMINISTA - Tomu DJ (42m, no vocals)
Spotify / Apple Music / YouTube Music / Amazon Music / Bandcamp / Tidal
What’s your earliest memory of music?
Listening to the same Celine Dion CD over and over again on road trips with my parents/siblings. I couldn’t understand a lot of the words so I often made up my own ones.
When did you start making your own music, and what were your first recordings like?
If we wanna get technical I first messed around with DAWs in middle school, making songs out of loops in GarageBand and scoring little video projects. Before that I had piano lessons until I was like seven and my teacher fired me because I didn’t practice, but I kept improvising on the piano at home after lessons ended. I also did some band and choir in school throughout most of my school years. I’d say that had more of an impact on my music making than the Garageband stuff, because I gained an elementary understanding of music theory that never really went away. I didn’t really make music again until after high school when I got into DJ Rashad’s music and learned how to use Ableton.
My first recordings can probably be found on SoundCloud if you scroll far enough; I think there might be an alternate account I used to have before starting the Tomu DJ project in 2017 or so. Like a lot of producers you can tell by listening to those demos that I didn’t take it that seriously, though in retrospect I was masking a lack of confidence and skill with ironic disafectedness, if that is a word. It’s not that I wasn’t trying to be good, I was just telling myself I wasn’t even trying to be good to cope with the fact that I wasn’t that good. In 2015 I made a few EPs that were definitely still along the lines of “joke music” though there were some moments of actual decent production throughout. It wasn’t until around 2017 that I thought hey this is pretty good, to the point where others might even think that as well.
Though I never recorded any of it, I always felt I was pretty good at music when playing the piano. I did not learn any complex theory or methods of playing, but improvising I always felt a sense of freedom, and using the few tricks that I did know helped me to create pleasant sounds that also reflected my inner experience. It’s definitely an honor to be able to put this piano album out decades later. I think it represents a playful and explorative side to my music that can get lost in the beat grids of DAWs and the confines of common time.
What artists/albums have been most influential on your sound – both your previous electronic work and your new solo piano record?
DJ Rashad, Terre Thaemlitz, and many other artists have been an influence on me… Honestly when I list my actual influences upon being asked a lot of people will not believe me or think I am trolling because they are not within the house/techno/whatever electronic genre the asker has pigeonholed me into, but hopefully that’s not as much of a problem with this album! Grouper, Julius Eastman, Jason Isbell and the 400 Unit, Mila Culpa, Future, countless jazz piano players I’ve been fortunate enough to see like Sullivan Fortner, Abdullah Ibrahim & the late Ahmad Jamal (for the record I’d never compare my technical piano skills to any of theirs, but they inspire me nonetheless), so many other artists have been huge inspirations in one way or another. Not just in sound but in process. Honestly, I am just as inspired by artists in non-musical mediums too. Everything we observe can expand our ideas of what is possible as an artist.
Tell us about the life experience that led you to want to focus the new record on solo piano.
Obviously the project is open to interpretation (hence the single “loose interpretation”) and I hesitate to describe any experience too concretely here. I will say ever since my music started gaining more recognition in 2020, I have experienced what was pretty unambiguously the hardest period of my life (mostly unrelated to music). And I’ve been able to process a lot of that through making art but by the time I started working on antagonist I felt the need to express a different side of myself using different tools than I usually use. No “sound design,” no spending years mixing the same track, no caring about what people think about the project, just raw conversations with myself depicted through a digital piano. I think if you take the time to listen to the record you’ll understand it (i.e. what it means to you).
I’m doing okay so far this year, which is the first year in so long that I’ve been able to say that, and it feels better to release the project from a place of renewed hope and self-esteem compared to when I made it.
Tell us about the process of recording these “a stream of consciousness” tracks. How much planning was done in advance / how much improvisation was there?
There was zero planning at all as far as writing the tracks prior to performing them. However there was a lot of material recorded that did not make it. What you hear in the record is technically basically me rolling my face over a digital keyboard for 40 minutes but in reality the process was a bit more complicated. If that were really all it was I could make an improvisational piano album several times a day. But I have to be in a certain state of mind (I was going to say mood but that doesn’t quite capture what I mean) to be able to perform at my best ability. And I can’t manually induce that when it comes to music like this. So all these songs are like documents of different times of my life.
In the corners of electronic music I often find myself in, there’s a very capitalistic culture around making as many tracks as you can which I never really understood. I have made thousands of tracks too but most of them are awful. I think my strength as an artist is in curating my own seemingly endless catalog and stringing together coherent pieces from an overwhelming amount of material. This is also the first mainline album of mine where I did the photos myself, which I really loved doing. Photography has been one of my favorite hobbies for the past few years so it’s super cool to have one of my photos on a record (even though it is my own)!
What instruments/gear/software do you use on your albums, past and present?
I use a lot of software instruments and Ableton; that’s mostly what you’ll hear in my released music on streaming. I can play other instruments like guitar but I am not as proficient with them as I am with a computer so they don’t make it on to my records that often. That being said I like to record in different places and studios and will pretty much use whatever is there.
antagonist was recorded in my home completely on a Roland FP-7F, a discontinued digital piano. I ordered a Roland FP-7 from Guitar Center and they shipped this instead, a way heavier, way more antiquated piano that I didn’t order. I decided it would be funny to just stick with it, especially after how hard it was to load into the car. One could say the Roland FP-7F itself was the antagonist of my back muscles. I just googled it and it is 52 pounds without the stand. I really want to get a lighter piano for shows eventually because there’s no way I’m bringing this out to a gig unless I am getting paid enough to risk injury to my body. But the sound of it is pretty hard to imitate; you can’t even get one online anymore. The keys are weighted heavier than any actual piano I’ve played which creates a unique sound. Despite the album sounding similar enough to a real piano being played (it fooled one of my friends), antagonist is actually distinctly a FP-7F album rather than a piano album. I’d love to record a studio on a Steinway or something like that someday. If anyone reading this can hook that up somehow, please let me know!!
How do you discover new music these days? Any notable recent finds?
Discovering new music has honestly not been my priority these days, but it is still an inevitability. A lot of stuff is shown to me by friends and sometimes it’ll come up on autoplay on my favorite streaming service, YouTube Music. Some recently discovered faves have been Denyah, Muslimgauze (admittedly I’ve known about his music for a while but for some reason I keep getting in this mood where it is all I can listen to), Joanne Robertson and MIKE. I have also really been loving salsa; it is ridiculously good sometimes.
Name an underrated artist from the past 50 years.
For this question I’m always gonna have to go with myself. But to be honest I’m beginning to see artists less as underrated and overrated and more as having a level of public visibility that reflects their commercial viability at a certain point and time. Like I’d never say Taylor Swift is overrated or something like that. I do not think I am actually “underrated” as my music has consistently received nods from famous artists, major industry players, and the press alike, but I think the commercial viability of anti-essentialist transgendered artists who do not capitulate to social media trends and industry standards is relatively pretty low. If your music isn’t getting the attention that you want there’s probably things you can do to fix that but nobody ever promised they’d be dignified things.
What are you working on next?
Too much, yet too little… I’m hoping to finish my fifth album this year (it’s more in line with my typical electronic sound) that I’ve been working on alongside antagonist, but I said the same thing last year. I also want to continue putting time into developing my proficiency in multiple mediums, mainly writing and photography but also playing musical instruments. There’s also other projects I can’t talk about and I’m not saying that to be cryptic or mysterious. I actually wish I could talk all about them.
