“FEMINISTA” by Tomu DJ
Tomu DJ is an American producer and DJ best known for her self-released albums on Bandcamp. She imbues her music with a gentle yet driving emotional force, creating intricate yet comforting melodies across her discography. Tomu draws inspiration from her inner self—her memories and her past—and seamlessly infuses these reflections into her music.
by Connor Dillman
FEMINISTA
In 2020, the year of self-reflection, the word “narrative” floated to the surface of the zeitgeist and beamed itself into our frontal lobes. Many who were being professionally therapized for the first time came to understand it in a certain context: does that former high school classmate you just ran into on the street really remember you by the time you projectile vomited on the floor in the middle of freshman year history class next to their desk? Or is that just a narrative you’ve regularly unspooled in your head during your daily morning shower for the past decade?
The answer, of course, becomes less obscured as we learn to recognize these kinds of thoughts at face value—only then can we start to approach self-image from a more compassionate angle. We begin to understand the importance of being at ease, of letting ideas breathe, of putting some distance between reaction and action, etc. I’ll cut myself off before this becomes a lecture from a very unqualified source. The point I’m circling around is that California-born artist Tomu DJ made a debut album called FEMINISTA that reflects this kind of internal journey beautifully.
Written while confronting psychosis in the aftershock of a life-threatening car accident in 2019, Tomu set out to create “uplifting anthems about loneliness and togetherness, both minimalist and maximalist in sound” as she formed these eight tracks. The result is a body of work that feels like a constellation of subconscious projections, each drawing from a sonic source unique to the musical identity that Tomu has been shaping since she dedicated herself to making original music in 2020. What ties them together is her gentle, knowing touch—the sense that these songs were given space to take shape in the wake of very present pain. “Everything that I thought made me who I am became so distant to me,” Tomu says of the time following the aforementioned trauma. The path towards rediscovering self-acceptance began with these songs.
In “Dula Peep,” the opening track, lightly reverberating synths wander around the steady pulse of a reggaeton-like beat, a fitting introduction to a project that commits to exploring at its own pace. From there, it’s an airy glide through an eclectic world of echoing compositions: “Schizoaffective” swirls ping-ponging plinks into an ambient nebula of calm that still manages to retain a whimsical flavor. “Rock69” opens the curtains on a sunny day to let the light flood in before “Exposed Nerve” turns up the BPM and tumbles to the dancefloor, where the album enjoys an extended stay. It’s there that it reaches a high point with “Pretty Stuff,” a single from the record and a personal favorite. It’s an almost eight minute odyssey through a hypnotic cyclone of breakbeats wrapped in tender keyboard loops, a textured landscape that might evoke a late night drive through a sleepy city or strobing memories of a basement club somewhere in Western Europe.
The last three tracks, rounding out the project’s emotional bell curve, bring the listener back to earth with a flourish. In “CONFUDIDA,” milky synth melodies form a continually warping terrain that sends the brain into a contented stupor on its way to “Cali / Florida,” a nearly tropical collage of carefree woodwinds over a confidently marching beat. “What’s Next,” the last stop on the ride, feels like flying towards a horizon line. With a drum’n’bass engine under a warm palette of ringing chord progressions, it soars to a fuzzed-out finish that very well may accompany the credits of an award-winning bildungsroman one day—such is its culminating effect.
As this album faded out after my first listen, I was struck by the lightness it left me to sit with. It was like a purifying stream of oxygen had snaked its way into my lungs and slowly spread from head to toe, pushing self-doubt and trivial worries somewhere far beyond my view of the present moment. It had prompted me to unconsciously drift through a cleansing circuit: a short walk, a little daydream on the couch, a bit of dancing in the bedroom, and finally a quick shower (sans any self-deprecating narratives, to be clear). It was bliss. If that’s not a sign that Tomu has succeeded in making the sounds of solace she was aiming for, I don’t know what is.
Connor Dillman is a writer and visual artist based in Los Angeles. He received his BA in English at Emory University and is currently studying Fine Arts at Otis College of Art and Design. He spent a good chunk of his early life on baseball fields around the world, but now he feels most at home by the ocean or on dark dance floors.