About

Koi Anunta is the founding and sole permanent member of In Love & WAR. She is a Yale graduate and medical doctor who gave up medicine to pursue greater happiness and freedom as a full-time musician in Los Angeles. 

Gifted with perfect pitch, Koi was classically trained in piano since the age of 4 and violin since the age of 8. The day she decided to leave behind classical music was during her NY All-State Piano audition at age 14, when she received one point off her otherwise perfect score because the judge thought that her “ritardando was slightly too slow.” Realizing that she was the kind of person who preferred to color outside the lines, Koi soon discovered and became thoroughly inspired by groundbreaking artists like Nine Inch Nails, Depeche Mode, Garbage, Portishead, Massive Attack, and Tori Amos.

The first electronic rock song Koi ever wrote, sang, programmed, and recorded by herself was actually played on the Top 40 radio station in her hometown of Buffalo, NY when she was just 15 years old—only to have it mocked, live on the air, by the DJ with superimposed barnyard animal noises. She never quite got over that. 

Although Koi still went on to form her first college rock band at 16, tour the country with her Yale a cappella group, and always continued to write songs for her own benefit, she shied away from ever singing solo in public again, and kept her original work private. After graduating with an M.D. from the University at Buffalo School of Medicine and Biomedical Sciences, she moved to Los Angeles and established herself as the go-to session and touring electric violinist for many other artists, such as Grammy winner Macy Gray and Grammy-nominated Gallant. 

Then, in 2016, a British film director happened to find a raw, unmixed song that Koi had written when she was 16, and had quietly posted and forgotten about on her personal SoundCloud account: “Mad Girl's Love Song.” He fell in love with the track and asked to feature it, as-is, in his upcoming film, The Goodbye Girl (2018). Koi was thoroughly surprised, but nonetheless touched that anyone liked her music, and gave her consent. That independent film has since won numerous awards, including “Best Feature Film” and “Best Director,” at several international film festivals. Even so, it wasn't until 2018 that everything changed, when Koi met a producer in Los Angeles who insisted on hearing one of her private song demos (now track 1 on the EP, “Stars”). Convinced of her talent, he urged her to record an entire EP. Tessitura is the result. In music terminology, the word “tessitura” can be defined as the comfortable range of notes in which a given voice will have its most characteristic and best-sounding timbre. Thus, Koi chose the name Tessitura for the EP, because she finally felt comfortable enough to reveal her original music publicly once again. The six songs that comprise Tessitura are a heady, eclectic mix of carefully crafted pieces that, like Koi's own divergent career path from medical doctor to musician, represent a dichotomy: part trip-hop and part symphony, reflecting both her heavier influences and classical roots. 

Tessitura was written, performed, and produced entirely by Koi, except for the drums (Mike Diggs) on all tracks, and on track 4, “Tell Me You'll Be There,” guitar (Jake Faun) and flute (Ricky Berger). The EP was mixed by Ali Nikou and mastered by Andrew Balogh. Tessitura will be available digitally worldwide on June 21, 2019. The lead single, “Gun To My Head,” will debut a week ahead of the EP with a music video, and will be available digitally worldwide on June 14, 2019.