Today we’d like to introduce you to Levi Antoine.
Hi Levi, please kick things off for us with an introduction to yourself and your story.
sappha is the stage name for my solo experimental pop project, for which I write, sing, produce, and play various instruments. I’ve kept a very DIY production style which City Beat Magazine dubbed “avant-pop” a few years back, and I really like that title. A lot of the women in music I looked up to when I was younger (Imogen Heap, Björk, FKA twigs, Grimes, etc.) all produce their own music, and my admiration of them inspired me to keep this project mostly self-produced.
I grew up in the Catholic school system until 7th grade, and felt pretty stir-crazy for most of it, but I think all that time singing hymns is where my love of harmony and vocal-driven composition comes from. Despite very decisively leaving the church at 13, I still draw a lot of lyric inspiration from the Bible, and from other religious texts. My 2022 single ‘holywater’ is maybe where all that Catholic guilt started to reveal itself in my music for the first time. My friend Tom Khoi Nguyen and I filmed the music video at First United Methodist Church in Hamilton, Ohio, near my hometown. Making that song really helped me make amends with growing up Catholic, which I resented for a long time.
Before I decided on the stage name ‘sappha’, I performed with an acoustic guitar in my late teens and early twenties at some open mics and local bar gigs. I had very bad stage fright and social anxiety at that time, so I didn’t perform live very consistently. But around age 25 I started really taking performance seriously and immersing myself in Cincinnati’s diverse music community. Siri Imani and Jess Lamb were some of the first local artists I met whose work I felt a spiritual kinship to. Siri is a hip hop and rap artist, and a philanthropist in equal measure, who I met in 2023 at an open mic she helped organize through her booking company Imaniii Productions. Community is her life’s work, and community feels like my chosen spirituality now as an adult, so I felt very drawn to her. Since meeting Siri, I’ve volunteered for her nonprofit for homelessness outreach and mutual aid called the Triiibe Foundation, we’ve booked other artists and curated some local music events together, and we wrote this song together last year called “WHOREMONEY” with Jess Lamb and her band’s synth player, Warren Harrison. Jess also has a lot of spiritual mantras and affirmations in her songwriting that were interesting to me. Jess is a voting member of the Recording Academy now, has an independent music label in Cincinnati called City Queen Sounds, and thanks to her submission, “WHOREMONEY” was on the voting ballot for the Grammy Awards in 2024. We work and think very similarly, so I think it makes perfect sense we share a lot of the same ethos creatively too. I’m really grateful I kept showing up in this community long enough to meet them, and I hope we keep telling stories to each other for a long time.
I’m sure it wasn’t obstacle-free, but would you say the journey has been fairly smooth so far?
I don’t think being an artist should necessarily feel like a smooth road, and it definitely hasn’t been. Almost all of my discography right now consists of songs I recorded alone in my apartment, and although I love feeling like a mad scientist, it’s easy to get lost in endless editing and knob-turning when you’re in a room by yourself with no one to answer to. So I’m excited to be working now with other producers and local studios for some projects. The fall of 2023 was my first time collaborating in the studio with another artist, which was Turich Benjy. He’s one of the biggest rappers to come out of Cincinnati, and his style is very melodic and avant-garde. I always wanted to branch into hip-hop/pop fusion, and I’ve written a bunch of hip-hop leaning tracks over the years that I usually end up shelving because they feel too corny. But there was a positive pressure to write my entire verse on the spot since Benjy and Gio were both improvising their verses, and it ended up yielding a really honest and cool verse. The song we made is called “Make Me a BELIEVER.” by Turich Benjy ft. sappha & Gio Getem.
That first studio collab was formative for other reasons, too, I think. It was a stark difference from how I was used to making music. In my late teens and early twenties, like a lot of young female independent artists, I was very naive, and got a lot of half-hearted business proposals from men with capital in the music industry. When I was 21 I was approached online for a collab by a former engineer for a disbanded electronic duo with billions of streams. At first I thought it would be a big step up in my career, but I decided not to send him my vocals after he made inappropriate comments about our age gap, and casually revealed he was still close with an accused abuser in that electronic group. A year later, a male photographer who almost exclusively did female boudoir shoots sexually assaulted me during a photoshoot together. Shortly afterward, sexual assault and harassment allegations came forward against him from over a dozen local young women, and he stopped doing photography altogether in light of many public demands for accountability. Experiences like these damaged my self-worth for years, and I hid my work away for a long time. That’s why my biggest caution to young artists—especially women—is to dodge narcissists and predators right away. Statistically, you’re going to meet a whole bunch of them in this industry, and your intuition is your best and first line of defense. That’s why I do really appreciate that this digital era of music we’re in has eliminated the need for a middle man in so many situations. But there’s a laundry list of sexual harassment experiences from men in the music industry I went through in my younger years before I found my community. Even though nightlife can be a playground for predators, it’s also home to some of the most big-hearted people you’ll ever meet, who I have learned to hold close. I’ve heard similar stories from most women musicians I know, so I believe it’s important to tell this darker piece of my journey. I want people know that success is possible no matter what traumas you’ve been through.
Appreciate you sharing that. What else should we know about what you do?
The project I’m most excited about right now is a 3-song EP I wrote and recorded this past spring with Eric Nally, vocalist of Foxy Shazam, that we intend to release in 2025. He is also from the greater Cincinnati area. The songs are definitely pop, but they feel weird and boundary-pushing to me in all the right ways. Eric is an absolute sweetheart, and I’ve been a Foxy fan since high school, so connecting with him was a full circle moment for me.
My debut album is also finally nearing completion after I delayed its release in February of this year. It’s a concept album about narcissism called NARCISSISTIC SUPPLY & CO. The lyrics relate the patterns of narcissistic abuse to hell and to themes in Dante’s Inferno. It’s very dark and sultry, but there’s an angelic quality I always want to keep in with my vocals. I do a lot of vocal re-sampling with pitched and chopped samples of my voice, which is one of my favorite things to do when I make music. I think my vocal production and the live effects I do when I perform (mostly on a Roland SP404 MK-II) are what really define my style.
If we knew you growing up, how would we have described you?
I’ve always been pretty introverted, and I was an awkward kid. I try to embrace my weirdness in my performances now because I think people appreciate honesty. I was involved in musical theatre and choir throughout a lot of my schooling though, and I think there’s a slightly operatic quality to my voice, and my range, that I owe to that. Singing is the craft I’ve always gravitated toward most, but I’ve always loved drawing and writing poetry too. Music just ended up being the best way for me to combine all my artistic passions into one world.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://linktr.ee/sappha
- Instagram: https://instagram.com/sappha.mp4
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/sapphamusic/
- Twitter: https://x.com/sapphamusic
- Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@sapphamusic
- Other: https://open.spotify.com/artist/75yEibRwh3fJUbf6TpxVJc
