Dominic Sen

"Before there was light and heat, the world was cold and cruel."

This revelation opens the creation myth at the center of the Geddir Luk'a Tam, an archaic text from a faraway civilization where many of its inhabitants possess a formidable power known as weaving. The myth chronicles how the sun and three moons come to exist in the aftermath of a great sacrifice, an event that simultaneously serves as the genesis of weaving and the beginning of societal flourishing. In her latest musical offering, songwriter and producer Alexandra Lily Cohen tenders a glimpse into this ancient, magical setting.

For as long as she can remember, Cohen, who goes by the stage name Dominic Sen, has used both original and traditional mythology to add dimension to her music. “Storytelling and world-building are a means of escaping the tedium of my own reality. They're also the best tools I have for self-discovery, for exploring what holds meaning for me.” In the same vein, Cohen views Dominic Sen as her proxy, and uses the persona to occupy a place outside the boundaries of reality, weaving truth and legend together to yield music that is usually pop and always evolving.

Cohen took this mandate literally in the case of her debut album Visitor, a concept album where the listener followed an extraterrestrial protagonist’s feelings of alienation as she grappled with a strange new world. Visitor was concurrently a love story, space opera, and thought experiment.

On her forthcoming LP Apparition, she draws narrative inspiration from the fictional and self-authored Geddir Luk'a Tam, but purposefully blurs the line between the mythological and the more personal aspects of the work. The result is a pop fantasia that draws from wide-reaching influences like Enya, PC Music, and Bach, and deals in thematic opposites – connection and isolation, creation and destruction, darkness and light. At its simplest, Apparition is a meditation on the natural world and the myriad wondrous appearances we encounter by virtue of existing each day.

"An apparition is many things. It is the arrival of the sun in our sky every morning. It is an unexpected connection with another living thing. Even the act of songwriting is an apparition," says Cohen. "Creativity is fickle and capricious, like a stroke of lightning."