When producer and DJ Jennifer Lee learned that Regina Biondo, her best friend and tour manager, had cancer, her world shifted.

Lee, who performs as TOKiMONSTA, delayed an album on the cusp of release and shelved a planned tour to care for Biondo in the final month before she passed in October of 2024, at 42.

Lee briefly considered not releasing music in the wake of Biondo’s death, but ultimately, the Los Angeles-based musician opted to put out Eternal Reverie. The record, she says, is a loving reflection on her grief and the profound impact Biondo had on her life.

“Life is short and tomorrow is not guaranteed,” Lee says. “Spend that time with the people that you love because you don’t know what will happen to them either.”

That energy is on full display if you’ve ever seen the Grammy-nominated producer and DJ perform live. A fixture in the LA electronic music scene, TOKiMONSTA has remixed David Bowie and Beck, and she’s collaborated with Anderson .Paak and Ryuichi Sakamoto. In 2019, she became the first female Asian American producer to be nominated for best dance/electronic album at the Grammy Awards.

In this session, Lee joins us to talk about making Eternal Reverie and how grief ignited her fire to make music. She also looks back on the creative challenges she faced in 2015, after undergoing multiple brain surgeries to address a neurological disease.

On caring for Biondo before she passed in 2024

“She had this cancer diagnosis. I don’t think that any of us thought it would end up the way it did … By the time it was August, it had taken a turn for the worst. Mind you, my album was supposed to come out in September, and I had this huge U.S. tour with, I don’t know, a bazillion dates. Fast forward to the beginning of September, and my friend is hospitalized. When she is put in the hospital, she never leaves again. …

“I just made the game-time decision to cancel my tour, to postpone my album … I put all that on pause, and me, her partner — her wife — and her sister spent that last month living with her and taking care of her until she passed. …

“Earlier in the year, when I would talk about this, when the album did drop, I could not have this conversation without crying — so I’ve cried in front of a lot of people I did not know very well this year. But now it’s, like, there’s so much wonderful and beautiful processing that’s happened. I will be grieving until it’s also my time, but I’ve developed this intense gratitude for this person. Regina was someone who shaped me, as a musician. This album is a reflection of her impact in my life.”

On briefly losing her ability to recognize music after brain surgery

“It was really harrowing. It’s important to understand that when I got this diagnosis, I wasn’t highly symptomatic yet. I was very lucky that I just had a few weird, slight stroke symptoms before I went and got this imaging that showed me that I was this ticking time bomb.

TOKiMONSTA

Jennifer Lee/Courtesy of the artist

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Jennifer Lee/Courtesy of the artist

“But the surgery itself. Y’know, you’re touching someone’s brain. It’s sensitive. Your brain is sensitive … I think, following the surgery, I was tired, but I had some friends visit me. We were playing dominoes. I don’t even remember … They left, and when I woke up the next day, I woke up unable to speak because of the brain swelling that happened from the surgery.

“It wasn’t until maybe a week or a couple of weeks after the second surgery that I realized that I couldn’t understand music. I had attempted to watch TV. I was watching Portlandia, which has a very epic intro song. I had no idea what I was hearing. …

“I lost my ability to understand music and to speak, but my cognition was still there. So I could watch the show and realize that I do not recognize it. At that point, I had not been exposed to a lot of music because I was in the hospital, so I didn’t know that that was a side effect of the surgery. It made that experience even more — to repeat the language — harrowing and difficult. We turn to music for healing, for a way to feel consoled, for support. When you don’t have music, you’re just sitting in a noisy room.”

This episode of World Cafe was produced and edited by Kimberly Junod. The web story was created by Miguel Perez. Our engineer is Chris Williams. Our programming and booking coordinator is Chelsea Johnson and our line producer is Will Loftus.