Witch Prophet sees the future: The Toronto neo-soul singer opens up about lucid dreams and the love that grounds her

In 1983, the CIA published a classified document detailing the U.S. Army’s investigation into the “Gateway Experience,” a term used to describe astral projection, or the potential ability for humans to access altered states of consciousness or transcend their bodies to travel across time and space.

The report was quietly declassified in 2003 but resurfaced on TikTok in the spring of 2021, as people pored over the mysterious document for clues on how to access “the Gateway.”

For Ayo Leilani, a Toronto-based singer-songwriter who performs as Witch Prophet, the sudden interest in psychophysical phenomena opened an opportunity to finally share her story.

Since 2009, Leilani has experienced frequent bouts of focal aware seizures, which disrupt her speech, movement or vision without affecting her level of consciousness. The seizures can cause acute episodes of déjà vu or déjà rêvé, lucid dreams and out-of-body experiences, but can also lead to debilitating side effects.

On “Gateway Experience,” Witch Prophet’s third studio album, Leilani employs her signature fusion of jazzed-out neo-soul and ’90s trip-hop — picture Erykah Badu performing a Tiny Desk Concert backed up by Portishead — to confront the various symptoms of her condition: dizziness, memory loss, moods that swing between extreme joy and sadness.

“There’s no telling where I’m going / Jumping in and out of timelines,” Leilani sings, her disembodied voice floating eerily above a lurching bass line and deliciously crisp snare hits on the eerie track “Bird’s Eye View (O.B.E.).” On “Dizzy,” she draws the listener into the experience of a seizure — “Got me spinning / Head over heels” — her words entangled with fiery trumpet trills.

“Gateway Experience,” which arrived Monday, is a transfixing journey into Leilani’s mind, and a trippy dive into the nexus of health, spirituality and human connection. Co-produced with Leilani’s wife and longtime creative partner Sun Sun, it’s also a sophisticated high point for an artist who has pushed boundaries in Toronto’s underground music scene for over a decade.

“I am someone who doesn’t necessarily show all of me,” said Leilani. “If I came out with an album like this five or six years ago, it would probably be a little too witchy or woo woo, but seeing people on TikTok saying: ‘Wow, lucid dreaming is real. There are other dimensions, and there are other things that we don’t know about.’ It made it a lot less scary to talk about.”

Leilani’s roots are in East Africa. Her parents fled from the decades-long conflict in Ethiopia/Eritrea to Kenya, where Leilani was born and raised until she was four. Her family immigrated to Toronto, settling in the neighbourhood of St. Clair West.

“I come from a very large, very religious extended family,” she reflected between tokes, sitting comfortably at home in a royal blue hoodie with her dog, a Maltese shitzu named Riku. “Growing up, me, my sister and all the cousins would always be told to go away and play. We had a band called the Cousins and, every Sunday after church at my grandmother’s house, we’d do shows. This taught me to love music but also made me terrified to do anything by myself.”

In high school, Leilani studied vocal music and theory at Oakwood Collegiate, learning to sing in traditional styles like opera. In her 20s, she embedded herself in a community of artists that eventually found expression as a radically inclusive collective called 88 Days of Fortune. For years, the collective pushed to integrate queer artists and music fans into Toronto’s hip-hop scene.

Later, Leilani and Sun Sun started a band with rapper Jamilah Malika called Abstract Random. “That was like electro, dub-hop, political, weird experimental music,” she said, laughing. “We wore a lot of costumes and made a lot of noise.”

It wasn’t until her mid-30s that Leilani focused on her solo career. In 2018, she and Sun Sun launched Heart Lake Records, a queer and women-owned independent record label designed to amplify under-represented artists.

That same year, she released “The Golden Octave,” her debut album as Witch Prophet. Featuring hypnotic production from Sun Sun and collaborations with local artists like Colombian-Canadian singer Lido Pimienta, the record was both a showcase of Leilani’s bold interpretation of neo-soul and powerful expression of her experience as a queer East African woman living in the diaspora.

“Every track is a sleepy surprise, each beat gracefully narcotic and topped by effortless trills,” Pitchfork declared. “Get to her before Drake does.”

Alas, Drake did not come a-knockin, nor did any other major labels or promoters.

“I have never, ever been approached by a single label to do anything,” Leilani said. “‘My career has always been DIY; not because I wanted it to be, but just because that’s how it happened.”

Ultimately, the approach paid off. “I’m glad that I didn’t wait around because those 10 years of making music, performing and making mistakes allowed me to be where I am now. When I’m in rooms with labels or publishers, I know what I actually want, what I’m worth and what the value of my music really is.

“I think it’s a problem within the Black music scene,” she added. “Hip hop, R&B, reggae. They are completely undervalued in the Canadian music industry, even though hip hop is probably the number one music genre in the entire world.”

But Leilani was just getting started. On Witch Prophet’s sophomore album from 2020, “DNA Activation,” she dug deeper into her roots, working with Sun Sun to craft a hazy, cannabis-inflected sound that blends Ethio-jazz and trip-hop. The record, which features lyrics in English, Amharic and Tigrinya, took inspiration from Leilani’s family and the myths of her ancestors. In 2020, the LP was shortlisted for the prestigious Polaris Music Prize, cementing Witch Prophet as one of the country’s most interesting and subversive acts.

Leilani’s music has always been personal: she has written extensively about her identity and her family. But the decision to write an album about her health marked a new frontier.

“I’ve always had prophetic dreams and I have always thought of myself as psychic,” Leilani said, but it was nearly 15 years ago that Leilani experienced a prophetic episode of déjà rêvé — a term that means “already dreamed” — that changed the trajectory of her life.

It was a pedestrian Sunday in Kensington Market, “in front of Golden Patty by the fish market,” when Leilani locked eyes with a woman walking by: Sun Sun.

“As soon as that happened, everything went into slow motion,” she remembered. “We connected eyes and I was like: ‘I know you. I’ve seen you before in my dreams. We are supposed to be together.’ And, from that moment, we have been.”

In 2018, Leilani and Sun Sun bought an abandoned house on a farm in a forest in Caledon, about 45 minutes outside Toronto. The couple renovated it, mostly themselves (“we ran out of money after paying for an electrician, a plumber and all the things that you actually have to pay for”) and built a home studio. That’s where they recorded and produced the new album.

Despite its otherworldly themes, “Gateway Experience” — which includes contributions from Canadian singers Begonia and Zaki Ibrahim, and virtuosic trumpet playing by Tara Kannangara — might be Witch Prophet’s most accessible project to date.

The primary strength stems from the undeniable chemistry between Leilani and Sun Sun, who produced 10 of the album’s 11 tracks. “There’s something about working with one producer and really growing together, you know? There’s that rock, that foundation. And Sun is my foundation.”

Across “Gateway Experience,” Leilani traces the highs and lows of her experiences with altered consciousness. On “Dreaming,” she recounts the day she met Sun Sun in Kensington: “I remember, the way I was / Falling all over, hypnotized / By your eyes / Time slowed down.”

On “Energy Vampires,” she unpacks a recurring nightmare that visits her during times of heightened stress or anxiety.

“I started having dreams of these incredibly tall, hooded figures, like super tall, like trees in a forest,” she explained. “You can’t see their faces, they are just a sort of silhouette of a body. They don’t walk, they glide … and they are looking for me.”

These nightmares render Leilani immobile, exhausted and nauseous, sometimes for days.

“Shamans have told me the (bad dreams) are energy vampires that feed off fear and anxiety,” said Leilani, “They say it’s right for me to run from them. But I’ve had other people tell me that those with the brightest light have the darkest shadow and that I shouldn’t be afraid.”

It’s during those moments of extreme fear that Leilani relies on her foundation.

“I’m scared / For what lies ahead / Unknown mysteries / In my mind I see,” she sings with palpable vulnerability on “I’m Scared,” a poignant piano ballad and the one song recorded without Sun Sun’s bolstering production. “Hold my hand / Take my heart / Keep me safe / In your arms.”

“I wanted to make something that was gentle enough to get my message across,” Leilani explained. “When I played it for Sun — obviously she knows what I’ve been going through — she immediately burst into tears. And then I burst into tears.

“I hope people hear this as a sort of therapeutic, medicinal album,” she said. “I want them to hear the honesty in it and to connect themselves and whatever they’re going through … Our mortality is something we should talk about. We are not immortal beings, yet.”

Photography shot on location at Westside Studio, Toronto. Photography by Wade Hudson. Styling by Christal Williams/Plutino Group. Hair and makeup by Robert Weir/Cadre Artist Management. Creative direction by Elena Viltovskaia.

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