When asked about her age, Afro-Indigenous-Venezuelan producer and songwriter Gotopo doesn’t give an exact number. Instead, her answer sounds like one of the lyrics of Sacúdete, her recent debut EP.
“I am older than all the trees that surround me,” she tells Rolling Stone via Zoom one afternoon from a studio in Berlin. “The good thing is I can’t remember my age. That’s why my life works — because I can’t remember exactly that age.”
Such a statement describes Gotopo’s project very well. Since her debut single, “Malembe,” her goal has been to create a futuristic universe rooted deep in her Afro-Indigenous ancestry, which she’s eager to remember and reclaim. Through her music, she’s proven to be an exciting artist and producer on the rise: Last year, Gotopo was one of several artists who received the Female* Producer Prize given by Sony Music and Music Women* Germany (MW*G), which highlights the work of female producers there.
Gotopo’s beats are an oneiric vehicle, designed to surface the pain caused by colonization. One way she does this is by inviting people into her realm and encouraging them to move, as she proposes on “Sacúdete,” lead single and title of the album. The first sacudida refers to the ritual of shaking it in the club. The second is a shaking of the mind — a kind of dancing that can interrogate and heal generational trauma.
“Gotopo can make you dance, can bring you joy, but is also going to make you think and interrogate many things,” she says, adding that the main subject of what she’s interrogating in her music is the deep wound that project of America has meant. She describes it as a persistent and untreated flu: “It is like a wound that doesn’t scar, that continues to bother you over time, continues to hurt you, continues to cause you problems.”
Gotopos’s relationship with music started when she was a child. She played the cuatro and sang Venezuelan traditional music. During her teenage years, the most popular genres in her neighborhood of Barquisimeto were ranchera, vallenato, and reggaeton. At home, she listened to tango, bolero, and folkloric sounds from Colombia, where she has family and also lived at one point. But she describes herself and her brother as “alternative nerds of the block:” They would blast heavy metal, pop, and R&B in English. Later, when she enrolled in a music conservatory, she learned to play piano and fell in love with Beethoven, Mozart and Mahler.
Then Gotopo migrated to Berlin, an experience captured in the short film “The Sound Of My Destiny.” Living abroad, her need to connect with her ancestry became more intense. Years prior, in a little town called Coro in the Venezuelan region of Falcón, a man on the street told her she had the same name as a legendary indigenous cacique. Gotopo knew there were parts of her history and identity that she had been missing, and she wanted to explore even further.
“I grew up in a family that never talked about those things. I grew up a little bit blind to my own identity,” she says. “I had to find it out on my own.”
In Berlin, Gotopo started producing her own music on her computer, coming up with songs like “Malembe,” which she describes as an invitation to dance — and also to remember and heal. “It can make you cry,” she says, referring to lyrics that depict the pain of her ancestors: “Tengo cuatrocientos años de pena en el alma,” she sings. “I have 400 years of pain in my soul.”
Gotopo worked with Kinky’s Don Elektron to create some of the most rompe-caderas tracks on the EP. There’s “Cucu,” an anthem to female empowerment on the dance floor and “Sacúdete,” which incorporates rhythmic elements of Raptor House, also known as Changa Tuki, an electronic music genre born in the barriadas of Gotopo’s home in Caracas. “I wanted something new,” she says. “A distinct sound.”
That sound comes with a deep message. To Gotopo, society has been built upon a colonial base that continues exacerbating structural inequalities — and she points out that spaces to reflect on the consequences of colonization are still pretty absent in pop culture. To have her music open conversations to fill that void, she says, would be her definition of success.
“There are movements, there are songs, there are artists doing it, but there is still mucha tela que cortar,” she stated. Referring to her sound as a bittersweet tropical fruit, she compared her new EP with a smoothie made with all the beauty of her ancestry but also the pain of the hard stuff that still needs repair.
With Simón Mejía, from Monte and Bomba Estéreo, Gotopo produced “Anda Camina,” part of what she describes as the less upbeat and more magical side of the album. The lyrics are an ode to the ancestral cosmovisión of Indigenous people and their relationship with nature. The relationship with Bomba Estéreo has been meaningful: She opened for the band at a sold-out concert for thousands of fans in Berlin, where she is part of a vibrant and innovative scene. Electronic artists, drawing from the country’s rich history of club sounds, often collaborate with South American acts based there, coming up with a unique take on dance music.
“I celebrate this sound that comes from these cities that are more about club music,” Gotopo says. “I’m excited to see where this is going and I’m excited to be part of it.”