Safii Koii On Her Quest to Get a Seat at the Mixing Desk
Written by Carlos José Jijón
In April of 2024, Jasmine Wembankoy received disheartening news. The young musician – better known by her artist name, Safii Koii – had applied for a scholarship that would allow her to study music production at the Abbey Road Institute in London. Believing that going back to school was her best chance of achieving her goal of becoming a professional audio engineer, she looked into educational programs related to music technology, eventually finding the course. However, after a lengthy application process that included multiple interviews, she did not get the aid she needed to cover the costs of tuition.
That same week, she picked up her electric guitar and recorded a video of herself singing a cover version of Kate Bush’s hit song “Army Dreamers.” She then posted it on her TikTok page (@safii_koii) and went to bed. By the time she woke up, the video had been watched over a hundred thousand times. “I started seeing the numbers going up and up and up and up,” she recounts. “Every refresh was another hundred thousand [views] until it reached three million.” Her immediate reaction was complete disbelief. Sharing music online was not new for Wembankoy, but this level of virality was unlike anything she had experienced before. A thought then crossed her mind. She now describes it as “a moment of delusion.” “At three AM, [I thought] ‘what if I start a GoFundMe page? If it doesn’t work, then I won’t be able to go [to the school] because I can’t afford it. If it does work…’”
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Wembankoy’s interest in music production originally came from her love of video games. Playing Assassin’s Creed as a young girl, she discovered the work of Jesper Kyd, the series’ composer, which inspired her to create music in a similar fashion. While in secondary school, she learned how to use the audio editing software Logic, which began occupying more and more of her time as the days and weeks went by. “I was obsessed,” she says. “I remember one time I got accidentally locked in school because I was playing around, making music on Logic and didn’t realize that, oh my god, it’s 6 pm! Everybody’s gone! They’re turning off the lights!”
At around age 15, Wembankoy started writing and producing her own songs, first under the alias Jasmine2Safi and then as Safii Koii (‘Safi’ being her middle name and ‘Koii’ a derivation of her surname). For uni, she moved from London to Leeds to study music production. Her studies, however, were affected by the Covid-19 pandemic, which took away opportunities to learn in actual studios with proper equipment. By the time she graduated, she was unsatisfied with her skills. “One thing about me is I care about education a lot,” she says. After some time trying to make it into the music world while working in hospitality, she was convinced. She had to go back to school.
Within the music industry, there is little female representation in roles like songwriting and production, and even less when it comes to women of colour. In January of 2025, a report by the Annenberg Inclusion Initiative analysed the race and gender of artists, songwriters, and producers involved in the creation of 1,300 popular songs from 2012 to 2024. Only 13.8 % of songwriters were women. When it came to females in producing roles, the number was 3.5 %. And of the 2,209 producing credits observed in the study, only 21 went to women of colour. This is a fact that Wembankoy has witnessed in her own artistic journey. “As a woman and especially as a black woman, there isn’t a lot of representation for me there. I only know like a couple of black female audio engineers,” she says. When she launched her GoFundMe campaign in 2024, her desire to “be the representation” she didn’t see was an integral part of her message. In one of her social media posts, she wrote: “2.8 % of women are reported to make up music producers/sound engineers and even less are women of colour. I want to change that, but I need a seat at the mixing desk first.”
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When describing her music, Wembankoy uses words like ‘whimsical’ and ‘ethereal.’ Despite not subscribing to a specific genre, she feels a strong affinity towards female alternative artists like Kate Bush and Mitski. Other influences include Blood Orange, Solange, and Gorillaz, which come together in a unique combination of everything from R&B to indie pop. As a project, Safii Koii features dazzling melodies and impressive singing coupled with rich and intricate sonic atmospheres. The songs explore themes of authenticity and performativity, which frequently inhabit the mind of their composer. She thinks of it as “performance without performativity.” “When you feel like you can’t be yourself or fully express yourself, it’s bound to do harm,” she explains. “I’m neuro-divergent. I have anxiety. I feel like I have to compensate in life in order to feel normal, but I don’t feel like that when I’m making my music. A lot of people have things – either it’s a hobby or a job – that it feels like it’s for yourself. I want my music to be like that. Even though I’m writing it for me, it’s something I share for other people to find comfort in.”
Being someone who describes herself as profoundly introverted, Wembankoy has a complicated relationship with social media marketing. “I feel like every musician or creative I know hates it,” she says. “‘Cause it’s so hard! It really is hard!” For her, trying to figure out what type of content will be favoured by the algorithm and forcing herself to post regularly is an exhausting exercise that can lead to serious burnout. This was a particularly challenging part of carrying out an online fundraising campaign. “I remember the pressure of trying to raise enough, really posting every day, really trying to push it. I had to learn how to like [it] and stay laser-focused on what the goal was. I remember the moment I thought, ‘this is what I really, really want, and I can’t stray from it.”
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By July of 2024, Jasmine Wembankoy had raised enough money to pay for a portion of her tuition fees, which allowed her to start studying at the Abbey Road Institute later that year. But even if she was closer than ever to her dream, she still needed to collect over 7,000 pounds to cover the remaining payments and complete her program. Thanks to the considerable size of her online community (with over 50,000 followers on TikTok), she had a platform she could use to reach people and tell her story, but there were still multiple moments of plateau when she was not making much money. “I just had to keep on pushing,” she says.
Considering the impressive level of her vocals today, Wembankoy claims that many people “don’t believe” how much she struggled when she first learned how to sing. “I was terrible,” she says. “I was actually awful.” This contributed to one of the biggest hurdles of her early career. For several years, the debilitating anxiety she felt while performing prevented her from singing live. “I used to shake in front of people. It just wasn’t natural to me.” After one particularly difficult concert, she decided to stop singing in front of audiences altogether. “I just wasn’t enjoying it. I was in my head and felt like so many people were judging me. I didn’t feel good enough to do it.” Three years later, during lockdown because of the Covid-19 pandemic, Wembankoy was going through a particularly tough time. Isolated from friends and family while stuck in her Leeds uni apartment, she sought refuge in music. Still, something kept bothering her. “Okay, I want to release my music,” she thought to herself. “But how am I going to get over my stage freight?”
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In September of 2025, Jasmine Wembankoy completed the music production course at the Abbey Road Institute. Just a few months earlier, she reached the goal of her fundraising campaign and thanked her backers with a heartfelt message on social media: “I hope to repay you all by not just holding the door open but creating more room for those who want to follow their dreams of becoming sound engineers!” When thinking of the highlights of her year so far, the course keeps springing to mind. Back in June, she had the chance to record an original song in Abbey Road’s Studio Two, the same place where legends like The Beatles and Adele once worked. As part of a workshop during her program, she got to meet Haydn Bendall, Kate Bush’s engineer during the 1980s and 90s, who even produced one of her songs. “The main highlight, really, is the school. Being able to make friends, make very cool music, seeing how much I’ve improved… There’s just been lots of highlights (laughs).”
Following the program, she’s excited to release, promote, and play music. After a long process of performing at open mics and playing in public in an effort to build up her confidence as a live musician, she’s back playing gigs. She’s also very happy with her latest single as Safii Koii, “Back Up Plan” (currently out on streaming platforms), which opens with the words “it was all fake/a pretty charade/this plastic turned to stone ‘cause of you.” She describes it as “the thing I’m the most proud of ever making.” In early October, weeks before the song’s official release, she had trouble containing her excitement about the track. “For the longest time, I’ve really, really wanted to record strings in my music and the strings part in this song is absolutely gorgeous, to the point where I’m like, ‘I kind of just want to release the strings!’”