Davin Dot Extracts Diamonds Through His Music

After quitting taekwondo and going through a period of upheavel, Davin Dot turned to music. His first album Snowman and the collaborations that followed gave him a new purpose.

In September 2023, at one of the lowest points of his life, Davin Dot released his debut album Snowman.  

The album’s inspiration came from a video of himself at three years old in the snow at Big Bear, which sparked the idea for a character named Snowman. (A still from the Big Bear video would become the album's cover photo.) “I was pretty sad. It was a numb type of sadness,” he told me. He saw Snowman as an extension of himself. “It was something I related to a lot, where I was so cold for so long that you get numb to the cold and get used to it.”

The idea of a concept album appealed to Davin because it let him turn his thoughts into a larger metaphor.  

He made the album in four months, quickly weaving together eight tracks connected by his depression. “I really wanted to finish something,” he said, emphasizing that he wanted “a body of work”.

The album opens with “Snow Globe”, a song in which Davin puts together samples of birds and rain with recordings of his outdoor surroundings to create ambiance. “I sat in my room at 6 a.m. with birds chirping outside and sang random stuff with no melody, no chords, nothing,” he said. “The beginning of that song came out of nothing.” He added a drop – “I was super into arps at the time, those super electronic sounds” – to add some gravity to the song.

The album is often haunting, as if the listener is treading on fragile ice that might crack at any moment. On “Nadia”, Davin uses vocal distortion to signify his disconnection from a girl when he admits with a sigh, “If my touch won’t save you/Think my hands are just too cold.”  

“Let me take my nap now,” he sings wearily on “Kidnap”. “I can’t find any songs that are super similar to that one,” he told me, citing Dominic Fike as the closest inspiration. On “Aguaman”, the pressure feels heavy: “I need help to tread all the waters,” he sings before admitting, “I’m drowning in it.”

Parts of the album are so dark that when I asked if he had anyone he could talk to, Davin seemed surprised that it could even be an option, instead of working through it himself. “We were all young. I was 18 at the time, and everyone else was around the same age,” he said of his friends. “So I didn’t really have confidence in talking to people about how I felt, or at least maybe trust.”

He paused for a moment.  “But music was definitely there. It was my favorite thing to do at the time. I could be by myself and geek out about a sound I was making.”

Long before Davin wanted to be a musician though, he was a taekwondo martial artist.

​Davin grew up in LA’s San Fernando Valley, an enclave behind the Hollywood Hills among a large population of Filipino and Latino families. His family moved around a lot in the Valley, but taekwondo gave him consistency, something to work towards. He trained every day except Sundays, but the work was fun, thrilling even. He learned about leadership and discipline, two skills that would help him as he grew into a producer and music director.

“That was my life before music — competing at nationals, state, everywhere,” he told me. “I think it gave me a very concrete vision of things even beyond taekwondo. I’m able to lead people in the correct direction when it comes to music, or even outside of music as a friend.”

Like many kids from Filipino families, Davin grew up in a family that loved karaoke. Some family members played guitar, but Davin wasn't drawn to music. “I really did not have any interest in it at all. I was so focused on taekwondo,” he said. “I wanted to go to the Olympics. I wanted to be like a ninja.”

When he wrote “Kidnap”, Davin would reference taekwondo: “You gave me diamonds in the form of kicks and punches.” The art form, he explained, was his own diamond. 

“I loved taekwondo — kicks and punches — martial artists may exert a lot of violence, but it’s controlled and in training,” he said. “For some people who do martial arts, that’s their form of letting go of emotions, like kicking a bag.”

Davin trained and competed consistently until COVID hit, when he began to feel depressed and stopped. At the same time, his family moved again, so he couldn’t be around the taekwondo community anymore. This time to a place he describes as “the middle of nowhere,” where he began to feel more lost. “It was a lot of mental warfare,” he said of the time, “but that’s when I started making more music and learning.”

Sometimes he’d think about the “diamonds” he found in taekwondo, and how after removing the gem from his life, he also lost an outlet to pour negativity or harder feelings into. Instead, the feelings lingered and festered, “I break in bunches from the violence held within me.”

In high school, he met a friend who showed him the basics of FL Studio, a music production software. Davin was instantly hooked. “I would stay up all night before school days and watch YouTube videos, learning about the program and how to make stuff sound good,” he remembered. “It was an addiction.”

He was driven to make good music. “It was wanting to make something sound better every single day. It was a challenge for me,” he said. “I think the competitiveness of trying to make myself create something better than yesterday was part of it. Rhythm, melodies — I was learning everything.”

Eventually, the work led Davin to create Snowman. “I felt like it was getting somewhere,” he said. “It felt like me. It felt different enough and still sounded good, so I decided to share it.” For a long time after releasing the album, Davin had “imposter syndrome.”

“I would think, ‘Dang, I shouldn’t have dropped this,” he admitted. At times, he regretted releasing an album as his first project. Maybe, he reasoned, he should have dropped a slew of singles and built up his sound over time. But, he emphasized, “There wasn’t ever a moment where I was really ready.”

Streams weren’t important to Davin: “That was the last thing on my mind,” he said. “It was just, 'I want to tell these stories, make it sound good with this myself, and share it with the world, whoever wants to hear it.’”

This year marks the first time in two years that Davin’s been actively promoting and releasing music. He’s experienced a bit of a learning curve as he tries to express himself again. He can feel detached when listening to Snowman these days because he feels so far from that person. But the quest for self-expression remains the same: to “find something that is undeniably myself and an extension of myself.”

In January, he teamed up with several friends to form fragments, a supergroup of independent musicians, and recorded SUPER SWAG MUSIC over two weeks. He found that whether he’s producing for someone else or recording his own music, “We’re all injecting the song with ourselves.”

Working with different artists has been empowering and exciting for Davin. It’s shown him that he’s multi-talented, but it’s also proven to him that he can be a teammate beyond martial arts. “I love helping other people. I love getting their vision and being able to focus on their vision,” he said. “It doesn’t matter what I’m doing, as long as I’m able to serve your vision and make your song or your art sound the way you want it to, and whatever serves the song best.”

He still thinks about taekwondo and what he misses about the sport. “I wonder if I would still be doing taekwondo consistently and going to the Olympics or something,” he said. “It’s crazy thinking about that alternate universe.”

But he tries to find that same form of catharsis-chasing in his music. When he thinks about that feeling, he explained, “It's when I’m making something, and I’m like, 'Dang, this sounds like me. This is me, and I love it.' It allows me to love myself in a different way.”

Over the past two years, Davin has continued to work behind the scenes on music, collaborating with friends as a producer. But he didn’t pressure himself to release his own songs. This year, along with the debut of fragments, he began to drop his own singles: “know bout us”, a collaboration with manni, and “AW YEAH” in June.

There wasn’t any “concrete reason” not to release during those years, Davin said. “Life was just happening. I was still making music and had a lot of ideas. I just wasn’t putting enough time into my own music during those two years,” he paused and smiled. “But we’re back soon.”