It’s difficult to describe Bay Area producer Tomu DJ’s music. She draws on elements of hip-hop, techno, ambient, and jazz, with skittering drum patterns and warm, fluttering synth tones tracing out lullaby-gentle melodies. It’s simultaneously danceable and meditative, welcoming and isolated, melancholic and comforting, hard and soft.
I was introduced to her music at the beginning of 2021, on one of many long Twitter scrolls. While her sometimes-jokey song titles drew me in—her debut album, Feminista, features a song named after a Wendy Williams malapropism—I found myself struck by her music’s dichotomous nature, how she implies vast and complex emotions within purely instrumental tracks.
In the years since then, she’s expanded her musical world, collaborating with artists like the New York-based rapper Petty Getty and the producer kimdollars1, while dropping a steady stream of new projects. Her upcoming album, I Want To Be (out August 30), is set to be one of her best, expanding her sound in new directions while maintaining its emotional core. She’s also organizing the upcoming West Oakland Music Festival on Sat/31, featuring a varied and exciting cohort of musicians from across California.
I caught up with her to learn more about her music-making process, what inspired her new album, and why the festival will be better than Outside Lands.
48 Hills So I’m gonna start with a very broad question, and then get more into the details. The very broad question is, how would you describe your approach to making music?
Tomu DJ For me, the process of making music is usually in the moment, and it can be really fast. Tracks might come together to like, 70, 80 percent completion in the matter of a few minutes. Then a lot of my process is sorting through a lot of stuff that I’ve made. I have, like, hundreds of half-finished or mostly finished things. When it comes to releasing stuff, it’s a curation and refinement process out of this vast amount of demos that I’ve made. For example, on my album that’s coming out, some of the songs were made back in 2020, when I really started producing a lot more seriously. But I didn’t have the technical skills to complete the ideas that I had. If the mix is off or the bass is off or there’s some problem that I’m not capable of solving, even if the song is one of my best songs, I can’t release it that way.
I feel like the process of creating music for me is very emotionally focused. It’s almost therapeutic, because I have a lot going on in my mind. So I try to make music that’s life-affirming. Often it’s just problem-solving. I’ll start with something, whether it’s a bassline or chords or something, and then it’s like, what needs to be solved for this to be an actual song that exists and that I can put out into the world? Maybe it needs drums, maybe it needs this and that. Getting the idea down, that can be very quick, but that process of solving the mixing issues and trying to figure out how to arrange it, that is what can take many months to years.
48 HILLS It sounds like the process is pretty improvisational a lot of the time.
TOMU DJ YEAH, totally.
48 HILLS But I’m wondering, do you go in [the studio] with a melodic idea, or a bassline, or a drum pattern, or is it what comes up when you’re in the space?
TOMU DJ When you’re a kid and you’re listening to music on the radio, it just sounds like [sings wordlessly]—you don’t know what they’re saying. But you recognize that when you hear popular music on the radio, it all has these certain things in common. And there’s these melodies that get stuck in your head, even if you don’t understand what it’s about or what it’s saying. That’s kind of the notion that my music is inspired by, this kind of essence of what music sounds like.
I haven’t been super good about this recently, because I’ve been so busy getting the album together and doing the festival, but I do a lot of piano improv. Up until I was 7 I had piano lessons, and I didn’t really take well to piano lessons when I was a kid, but I did like to improvise based on what I knew. And it would be really basic stuff, but that’s what I’ve always done. Sometimes I’ll just sit and play piano for an hour or something, and develop this vocabulary that I’ll later draw from when I’m in the studio trying to produce.
The process of making music is translation to me. It’s translating this really obtuse language that I have in my head to, like, how do I get this through the computer or through the guitar or whatever I’m playing? How do I translate that into something that is going to reflect back to me as this beautiful music?
48 HILLS In a weird way, I feel like I can catch that in it. Even when there’s no words, it feels very human, very grounded and embodied in a way. I don’t know if that’s quite what you’re saying, but somehow hearing that, it makes sense to me.
TOMU DJ I feel like it sort of facilitates a space for thought. I would be finishing up the mixing while I had friends over, and [ask], “Are people in a good mood? Are people talking about stuff that’s positive? Are people connecting with each other while I’m mixing these sounds?” It was designed to evoke these physical sensations, and ground me in the reality of the music.
The whole process of crafting the album was me trying to understand myself and what it means to connect with people through the music that I make. I wanted the album to represent a full range of emotions, and how confusing and full of misunderstandings life can be. In order to do that, I set out to accomplish an unreachable goal of making an album that perfectly represents who I am. But I think when people hear it, people will understand what I’m trying to say. It’s sort of my imperfect understanding of what people like about music.
A lot of it is inspired by experiencing life as a trans person, that disconnect between how I see myself, how I see the world, how the world sees me, and how the world actually might be—all the subjective different realities. It’s a confounding and confusing experience, and it can be a combination of different truths. I feel like that’s what I’ve learned through living life as an out transgender person. Like, things are not always as they seem. [laughs]
I don’t feel like being a trans person makes my life more difficult necessarily. I can see past certain things that many people don’t want to look past because of homophobia, where people don’t want to express themselves. So in that way, it’s easier. But it’s a different set of things it opens you up to, which most people just don’t think about. And I think that influences a lot of the work.
48 Hills It’s interesting because I was thinking about that—because I’m also a trans person—and I was curious if that was something you brought into your music on an intentional level.
Tomu DJ I think I had a time where being a trans woman specifically was very valuable to me, and having people see me that way and use those pronouns for me and stuff. And the way I see it now is that I’m not essentialist about my identity. I don’t think it results from any inner sense of who I truly am. I feel like I’m a human being who’s seen in a lot of different ways, and who is of a generally feminine expression, the way that I see it. But other people clearly don’t see it that way.
I saw people write about my first album Feminista being a story of a trans woman coming out as a trans woman. I didn’t see it that way at all. I felt like Feminista was really about [how] it doesn’t matter what I am. I am a feminist, I care about women’s rights, I care about gender equality. It’s not about, I am a woman which makes me a feminist. You know? Regardless of what I’m going to look like or identify as—or be identified as, honestly—I don’t really get my power out of identifying as anything. I know who I am, and knowing who I am means knowing I don’t know who I am.
That’s what my music is about, rather than, “I am a woman and I’m confident because of that.” It’s like, being a woman is hard. Being a man is hard. Being neither is hard! No matter which you are, there are aspects of the patriarchy that are going to fuck you over, no matter what.
48 HILLS I feel like I hear it. Since so much of your music is instrumental, instead of listening for some kind of narrative telling me what the song is about, I have to come to my own conclusions and listen to what it makes me feel. It shortcuts past the idea of putting a label on whatever it is that you’re doing, and is more about, here’s a thing that you can take or leave.
TOMU DJ Yeah. When you go into a modern art museum, you might be watching a video of someone stepping on broken ceramic for 10 minutes, and you might not know what that means, but you’re sitting there trying to figure it out.
With music, there’s this aspect of it where if you play a nice chord, it’s going to sound great and it’s going to make you feel good. Minor chords, major chords, they all evoke these different feelings. I feel like music theory comes very much from Beethoven-ass, old-ass people, but there’s this whole form of music theory that develops from jazz, where it’s branching out a little bit more. And then you have artists like Future. When you listen to the melodies and the wordplay, the emotions he’s able to express, the fluidity, it kind of expands what you believe is possible.
It reveals some things that people deeply connect with—something reaching into this deep scientific connection that people have with music. There are so many artists that are clearly doing the same thing, clearly going deeper and deeper into their vision. And that’s the path that I see for myself. I’m very grateful if there is one, five, ten people who resonate with that.
With the West Oakland Music Festival, I want everyone to have that same experience, if you’re interested in hearing something new. It’s pop, alternative, indie, R&B, hip-hop, dub techno, balearic music, even rock music. I’m really glad to be able to apply what I’ve learned in doing music for the past few years to, I’d say, the best event I’ve ever done in all my years of organizing these things. Outside Lands is like 150, 200 dollars a day. And for 5 percent of the cost of a general admission ticket to Outside Lands, you’re gonna get to experience something where the people might not be as famous, but the experience will be better. It’s real underground shit and it’s a real amazing way to experience it.
48 HILLS I was listening to the artists booked for the festival, and it felt like everyone is doing their own individual thing. I was wondering, did you have an idea like, I wanna get artists who cover a specific sphere? Or was it just more people you think are doing cool stuff?
TOMU DJ I would say both. Some of my friends in LA decided to come out for the show when they were able to carpool, which was great. The rest of the artists [are] local. Raven and Zero Charisma were two artists I was incredibly captivated by ever since I saw them. I was like, I need to scheme something to get these people in the same room performing. Matt and NFS, who run Cone Shape Top Center for Arts and Music, were the DJs for the [album] listening party [in April], so they were happy to help out. And IDHAZ is somebody who I’ve really wanted to do a show with for a long time and it never lined up until this moment.
I wanted it to be electronic music, but not necessarily what you would immediately think of when you say electronic music. And I was thinking of how I fit into that equation as well. I’m really happy with the way it turned out. Everything worked out better than I expected, honestly. Now I just have to promote really hard. It made me a lot less anxious when you reached out, because I’m like, OK, I can talk about this somewhere that’s not my Instagram! [laughs] I’m really appreciative of that opportunity.
48 Hills Thank you! We kind of covered everything. Is there anything else you wanted to add, anything that came up, or any other thoughts?
Tomu DJ I kind of said a lot! I’m really excited to get this show on the road, and for people to hear the album. My thoughts recently have been, like—you’re never gonna be legit until you believe you are, do exactly what you wanna do, and believe that that’s a purpose you can get behind. And I feel like with this album and this festival, that’s coming into focus for me. I’m excited to share it with everybody.
WEST OAKLAND MUSIC FESTIVAL Sat/31, 5pm. More details here.
