[6] She soon started to take formal violin lessons,[4] but gave up by age 12, instead opting to spend many hours playing the pianos of the houses her mother was cleaning.

[4] In 2009, she started club night Clap Trap with friend Jackie Thompson[13] and that same year she began composing for other people, mostly writing film and theatre scores, taking inspiration from Bernard Hermann’s work for Alfred Hitchcock.

[4] The Afrodeutsche project was started in 2016, growing from a search for Smith-Rolla’s biological father, in which she discovered her Ghanaian roots also included German and Russian heritage.

[18] Smith-Rolla was invited to attend a five day residency at Brighter Sound with Beth Orton in March 2019, sharing her creative processes with seven local female artists.

[26] On working with Ames, Smith-Rolla has said: “I’ve been very blessed… he was orchestrating my work as well as conducting, so there was this connection with the orchestra that was innate, that I couldn’t have engineered.”[27] Later that year, Smith-Rolla collaborated with researcher and PhD student Alex Jovčić-Sas on a project exploring Gertrud Grunow and Daphne Oram’s unique contributions to optical sound theory through archival material, the loan of a Mini-Oramics Machine (an image-based sound generator designed by Oram) and modern compositional tools.

[28] Smith-Rolla performed at the Southbank Centre’s QEH in October 2021 for another world premiere of one of her compositions, 'Promises', alongside the BBC Concert Orchestra and fellow producers Daniel Avery and Aïsha Devi.

[7] In addition to musical composition, Smith-Rolla is a prolific DJ, having toured throughout Europe and performed at Dekmantel,[31] Sónar Barcelona,[32] Dimensions,[33] and Berghain[34] alongside artists such as Aphex Twin[35] and Dopplereffekt.