Tokimonsta finds adversity has only made her stronger

A pair of emergency brain surgeries in January 2016 saved Tokimonsta’s life. But the procedures’ after-effects wrecked her ability to hear music as music; all she could perceive was a horrid, clangorous din.

Tokimonsta is the stage name of Los Angeles-based Jennifer Lee, a respected young Korean-American electronic dance/hip-hop producer and DJ. Her then six-year-old career credits already spanned a spectrum of notable names, from breakout rapper/singer Anderson Paak to certified rap legend Kool Keith to established pop-R&B hitmakers Justin Timberlake and Kelly Rowland (and including Chicago MC Lupe Fiasco, for whom she remixed two hits). This sudden, wholly bizarre disability was potentially calamitous.

But as Lee gratefully recounted in a recent phone call, “The brain is a crazy, amazing, powerful little thing – it sorted this stuff out, and I was able to make music again.” Four months later, Tokimonsta was performing live at Coachella in front of 15,000 festival-goers.

And now, fully recovered, Lee brings her new world tour to Concord Music Hall on Oct. 5, the night before dropping her latest Tokimonsta album – her first since recapturing the sound of music. On the triumphant “Lune Rouge,” Lee’s soundscapes are lavishly melodious, amplified by magnetic beats and laced with hints of tangy East-Asian strings.

She’s enlisted a fresh assortment of featured vocalists, including Malaysian indie-pop star Yuna, whose feather-light voice oddly just suits the steely sentiment of lead single “Don’t Call Me.” Electronic artist and singer MNDR, a colleague of Lee’s as a producer, remixer and DJ, imbues “We Love” with a touch of giddy euphoria, and red-hot local MC Joey Purp (a founding member of the high-profile SaveMoney collective) spits a steamy verse on “No Way,” alongside Chicago-affiliated Tennessee rapper Isaiah Rashad.

“The SaveMoney guys are getting so much shine, especially Vic Mensa and Chance the Rapper and Towkio,” Lee said appreciatively, adding, “Joey’s always been my favorite; there’s so much intelligence behind the way he rhymes and how he writes. I always told him, ‘Joe, dude, you’re gonna be super-huge.’ I love that he’s getting so much recognition – I’m so glad he’s on this record with me.”

“Obviously I’ve been a super-big fan of her work since before we met,” said Purp, “and she’s been super cool ever since. Super-good person, super-great artist, honest to her craft and pushing things forward, man.”

Soul, pop, and reggae singer Selah Sue, who hails from Belgium, provides heartfelt, yearning vocals on Lee’s deeply significant “Lune Rouge” track, “I Wish I Could.” “That was the very first song I made once I was on the up [side] of recovery,” Lee detailed, emphasizing that it’s “the song with the most emotional connection to me; it showed me everything was gonna be O.K.”

The artist had been diagnosed in 2015 with a rare and life-threatening cerebrovascular disorder called moyamoya disease, after a decade of experiencing severe headaches and, that fall, fleeting and unexplained numbness. Her cerebral arteries were blocked, rerouting blood flow through tiny capillaries ill-equipped for the load, causing her symptoms and creating a high risk of stroke.

Though Lee was successfully treated at Stanford University’s Moyamoya Center, the surgeries not only left her unable to make sense of music – she also could not speak. (Lee found her musical impairment to be the more disconcerting of the two, as she recently told Pitchfork magazine.)

Once she did start to retrieve language, “I could only speak from a certain pool of words,” Lee said. “I was totally aware that I couldn’t talk, that I had things I wanted to say but could not say them.”

Her medical team “would do verbal tests, asking me mostly simple stuff I would always nail: ‘What’s this thing?’ ‘A watch.’ ‘What’s this other thing?’ ‘A pen.’ ‘Where are you?’ ‘The hospital.’” Trying to comprehend the abstract phrase “No ifs, ands or buts,” she remembered, was more problematic.

“But every day that I would progress,” Lee continued, “that pool of words would increase, and my grammar would improve.”

Simultaneously, so would her auditory understanding of music. “They’re correlated,” said Lee, noting that both functions were affected by “whatever part of my brain was bruised at that time. So as I was able to speak more, music gradually started to make a little bit more sense.”

And then came the day that Lee had confidently created “I Wish I Could.” “And I was so excited and so happy,” she said. “And proud.”

Tokimonsta was back.

Moira McCormick is a local freelance writer.