Gwendolyn Dot has some questions. More than a few, really.
“Having complex emotions tends to drive me to figure it out,” the Detroit performer says. “Making music is one way I’m crystallizing it — so that I can understand more of what’s going on. [Music] always helps me understand more about my own experience and the ideas I might be wrestling with at the time.”
Dot’s music and lyrics become a means to cathartically articulate these questions and ideas, particularly when she invites us to consider, for example, the purposeful destruction of repressive societal structures that not only ingrain and perpetuate but also trap us in toxic cycles.
But that’s also conveyed by Dot through captivating arrangements of head-swimming synths and danceable beats, swooning atmospheric drones, and entrancing lyrics sung in an intentionally ethereal intonation. The invigoration generated by said beats, the provocation of the haunting minor keys, the vaporous vocals like a not-yet-faded dream, each act in symphony to spur you toward an awakening.
Willing to burn
Dot has a lot on her mind, and it’s all coming through on Psyche, her debut full-length album, which comes out on Friday, Aug. 21, on Detroit Industrial. The lead single, “Becoming Artificial” and its accompanying music video recently dropped, elegantly spiking with a chorus that declares, melodically, that “if you’re not ready to destroy, you’re stuck on the wheel.”
“It’s the wheel of karma,” Dot says, then adding out of self-awareness, “here’s the Buddhist influence coming in, which has been in my work forever. But ‘Becoming Artificial’ came from an encounter I had with someone that really showed me the tension a person holds when living inside repressive structures. It affected me because I also live in repressive structures, we all do. But that song came through my own frustration and fire — I have a lot of passion for breaking through structures because I care about people a lot and I can feel very hurt when people I love are suffering.”
Dot, who moved to Detroit from Indianapolis in 2018, says she’s always been asking questions, dating back as far as her early teenage days of being raised in the church within both a conservative family and community. She wanted real answers. She wanted truth. She wanted the assurance of, or at least the option for, emotional and spiritual autonomy. That’s just one question, of course, albeit a big one, but on Psyche, Dot’s discovered the answer.
“You have to be willing to burn literally everything down and start anew,” Dot says. “The classic example is the phoenix. If you’re not willing to do that, you will not grow. But the thing is, it’s really hard to burn something down, to let something go. We get so attached to ideas, to people, so we can fight that. We’re fighting against this real spiritual need to burn something down, so we just live in this tense, repressed space. And we can’t be authentic, we can’t be free in that space, so we’re stuck on the wheel of karma.”
Tension inside the beauty
Stuck… break… destroy… uncovering… dreams… waking up… terraform… These are some of the most prominent and powerful recurring lyrical motifs of Psyche. It’s worth emphasizing here that, along with this myriad heavy subject matter, there are also just some straight-up bangers on this album, drawing upon and reimagining electronica and techno through a cyberpunk lens with a uniquely melodic-pop sensibility.
Dot’s lyrics, to put it albeit reductively, are informed by a fascination and reverence of not just Buddhism, but various forms and traditions of mysticism, mixed with a day job as a mental health nurse practitioner and therapist that assuredly immerses her deeply into the human condition and weariness of the mind. This, she can articulate. “But I feel like I have a little less awareness of my own musical tendencies,” she says.
“I played the piano since I was 7, and I’ve been involved in music for so long, that it comes as second nature to me,” Dot says. “I’m extremely interested in melody, but I also love noise and abstraction too, and I tend to flip between both. I’m also interested in music that is beautiful and confronting in some way, or tense — a tension inside the beauty — I try to embody that. And I write pop-structured music partly because I love melody and I love to sing. I also love this ethereal ghost-like type of thing, because I enjoy this haunted beauty. Even if I’m singing in a major key I want it to be a little bit dissonant.”
Dot says that, to her, this “uncomfortable beauty” is a representation of reality, and reality “is beauty and suffering.”
She adds, “I care to reflect reality as much as I can — what I see reality to be.”
And, yes, there’s also a song that ruminates, lyrically, on both a literal and perhaps symbolic mirror. “There is a symbolic dimension to this world, but when you can open your mind to seeing the symbolic, you get invited into way more information about reality,” she says.
Going back to “Becoming Artificial,” Dot equates being “stuck on the wheel” to being artificial in a way, as she ruminates upon “this postmodern idea that nothing is real anymore — everything is hyper-real, everything’s a copy.” She then considers the tension between synthetic and organic, thriving as a producer and songwriter within an “electronic” genre, “where I’m using technology but also being human. What’s our relationship to technology? Does it make us more artificial or more human? Or maybe neither?”
Questions can beget questions. More questions conjure more songs.
Choosing to be…
Dot released her first EP, Mystic Responsibility, in 2018, when she was still living in Indianapolis. When she moved to the Detroit area, she spent the next five years developing, recording, and performing as a duo known as Torus Eyes, with R. Solomon, which tapped into darkwave and synth-pop. Dot returned to flourishing her solo project in 2023 and spent much of that year, into early 2024, writing most of the songs featured on Psyche.
And though this is a solo project, where Dot’s lyrics suggest the expressions of an “I” or a first-person narrator, that is intended to be an invitation for any listener to hold up that aforementioned mirror. “When I hear the word ‘I’ in music or in poetry, I reflect on myself — that’s a universal ‘I,’” she says. “Sometimes it’s very specific, but I tend to care about being a bit more abstract, even though I’m singing ‘I’m a motherfucking priestess’ on a song like ‘War of Love.’ Yeah, I am, but are you? Think about it — maybe you are, maybe you’re not.”
Dot pauses for a beat before adding, “I can feel so embarrassed in some way, or vulnerable. But I’m choosing to be just fucking real.”
Gwendolyn Dot’s Psyche record release show with Ritual Howls and more starts at 9 p.m. on Saturday, Aug. 30 at Leland City Club; 400 Bagley St., Detroit; gwendolyndot.bandcamp.com.
(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by PostX News and is published from a syndicated feed.)
