Somni is Leo Shulman, a UK born, LA based producer and singer/songwriter. With a wide range of influences spanning from Flying Lotus to Elliott Smith, Somni’s music toes the line between electronic beat music, indie folk, and lo-fi hip hop. With features from Mixmag, Pigeons and Planes, NPR, Passion of the Weiss, Electronic Sound, Bandcamp Daily and more, Somni continues to showcase his exciting, genre-bending style with his new album, Gravity, set to release Sept 8, 2023.

Born into a family of classical musicians, Leo started making music at an early age, studying classical, jazz, and folk music, with guitar being his instrument of choice. He switched his main focus to beatmaking in his teens, drawing inspiration from LA beat scene titans like Flying Lotus, Shlohmo, and Teebs, as well as UK based artists like Burial, Amon Tobin, and Portishead. After signing to LA based label Friends of Friends in 2018, Somni released his debut Bloom, an electronic beat driven album that employed a “warm, swirling collage of ambient electronic sounds and layered vocals” (Bandcamp Daily). His follow up Home was released in March 2020, where he began combining his colorful beatmaking style with his love for melody and lyricism. This pivot into songwriting, inspired by indie and folk artists like Elliott Smith and Modest Mouse, brought a “human element [that] breath[ed] new life into his music” (Pigeons and Planes). In October 2020 he released his Beats Vol. 1 tape, a headnod-inducing mix of sample based instrumental tracks that “employ[ed] the layering of previous work in concert with drums and rhythms that will have you calling your chiropractor” (Bandcamp Daily). Starting off 2021 strong, Somni enlisted a host of friends - Omari Jazz, S.Maharba, Shrimpnose and Joe Nora among others, to showcase their musical talents (as well as his own) on Up Too Early Vol. 2, a compilation of “lush ambient [music] for the daydreamers who float around in the early hours” (Mixmag). In October 2021, Somni teamed up with lo-fi legend Harris Cole for their collaborative Sirens EP, which “bridg[ed] gaps between ambient, electronic, hip-hop, lo-fi, and each producer’s respective sound” with “halting drums [and] swirling and glitchy instrumentation” (Bandcamp Daily). 

Gravity, the new album, is set to release in Sept 2023 via Friends of Friends Music. On the album, Somni offers: “I think this album deep down comes from a place of desperation, of anxiety and stress over life and the passage of time. It’s about getting older, trying to figure out a path to tread and realizing the way that the world is set up and that the cards may be stacked against you. It’s about trying to grow as a person and feeling these forces that are at odds with your growth, tugging at you to drop back down into the hole you’ve been inside. That’s where the concept of Gravity comes from; the forces around us and inside of us, that are always pushing against us, and how we can either try to escape these forces or accept the reality of them.”