“She’s always putting us up on health things,” says Brian Warfield, one half of Fisticuffs (Miguel, Mariah Carey), the production duo that’s been working with Aiko since that first mixtape and was behind the boards for much of “Chilombo.” Fellow native Angelenos, they initially met Aiko on MySpace now they have their own studio in Culver City, not far from where Aiko grew up. What else can I do? I can meditate, I can exercise - and then when I discovered the sound healing, that was something that I could really get into, because, obviously, I do music.”įrom Fiona Apple to Yves Tumor and a head-spinning assortment of artists and genres in between, these are, alphabetically ordered, our favorite songs of 2020. I started to feel like my body was probably too sensitive to do these things that I see everyone else doing. “I would take something to go to sleep, if I was feeling sad that day. “For me, getting into other ways to heal came from just years of like … self-medicating, probably,” Aiko says. Starting with her star-studded self-released 2011 mixtape “Sailing Soul(s),” which featured Drake, a then-nearly unknown Kendrick Lamar and Kanye West, to multi-platinum singles “The Worst” and “Sativa” that she wrote herself, to, yes, the alternative medicine and holistic healing - it was all done Jhené’s way. When she decided to go for another ride after giving birth to her daughter Namiko at 20, it was entirely on her own terms. Her father, who is Black, Native American and German Jewish, pursued it as an amateur - he is a pediatrician by trade - and her mother, who is Japanese, Spanish and Dominican, did so professionally, managing Aiko’s older sisters in an R&B group called Gyrl. Her parents were both interested in music. “When I played one, I liked how it actually felt - the emotion of it,” she recalls.īy that point, Aiko had already ridden the music business roller coaster after being introduced as a sidekick to boy band B2K (the record label presented her, falsely, as a cousin of Lil’ Fizz) at the tender age of 12, and gotten off of it by choice in her late teens.
Growing up around Baldwin Hills and Ladera Heights, she first encountered singing bowls as a teenager browsing in a local shop. 19 on Billboard’s R&B/Hip-Hop chart, Aiko goes fully New Age - her clear, light soprano unadorned by anything besides the endlessly ringing bowls. On “ Trigger Protection Mantra,” a sort of sequel to “Chilombo”’s “Triggered (freestyle)” that reached No. She studies with Jeralyn Glass, a musician and sound healer who also works with SZA she even appeared at an event hosted by Glass last year, called Sacred Science of Sound. Though it may provoke skepticism in some less metaphysical music fans, learning about sound healing has been a lifelong process for Aiko - one that she approaches seriously and methodically. Each track on “Chilombo” features different singing bowls, complete with a guide to which chakras they’re meant to activate that Aiko posted on her Instagram. When rung, they produce tones meant to resonate with listeners at a cellular level, tapping into different chakras (a theory of human anatomy familiar to anyone who’s taken a yoga class). She explains “Chilombo”’s concept: sound healing, not simply in the conventional way we think about music as therapeutic but through a specific system of crystal singing bowls.
From homegrown jazz to furious punk to raw hip-hop recorded from prison, these 10 albums highlight L.A.'s creative spirit in a hard-scrabble year for musicians.