Dominique Njoya Mouchili — Dominik — was born in Paris in 1984, the son of a Cameroonian diplomat. By the time he was a teenager, he had lived in three continents and four countries: France, England, Japan, and Cameroon.

Tokyo was the longest stop. Five years in Japan as a child, where his father served as ambassador. Summers in London with family — and one of those summers, in 1992, changed everything. A neighbor of his aunt, a young hip-hop head, played him Snoop Doggystyle from start to finish. Dominik was eight years old. He never recovered.

Back in Cameroon as a teenager, Dominik attended Lycée Fustel de Coulanges in Yaoundé — the French school in the capital. Around 1997, he and a few friends formed a rap group called Razel. They freestyled regularly with Accent Grave, a Cameroonian rap collective produced by Paul-Édouard, who would go on to shape much of the country's hip-hop scene.

The kid from Paris with the Snoop tapes was now writing rhymes in a Yaoundé schoolyard, side by side with the artists who were building Cameroonian rap from the ground up.

He studied at a French boarding school from age nine, returning to family in Japan for summers. Later: Madrid, where he finished his education at the French school and started working in communications, real estate, and public relations alongside his older brother.

But the music never stopped. Around 2004, while based in Madrid, Dominik moved to the Canary Islands and joined a group called Oakland with the French producer Nikonoki, an old friend with roots in the 1980s French hip-hop scene. Together with Nikonoki's label partner Jhonny, the group spent two years working on tracks and performing — close to breakthrough, with contracts on the table — until internal tensions broke them apart before release.

Back in Madrid, Dominik did what street artists do: he made a mixtape, paid for 1,500 copies out of his own pocket, and sold them by hand at €10 each while doing PR for nightclubs in the city. He moved every copy. Over fifteen thousand euros, one cassette at a time.

Today, Dominik lives in Marbella, Spain. He has spent three decades writing, recording, and performing — sometimes loud, sometimes underground, always present. He is not an emerging artist. He is an artist whose moment is now arriving on his own terms.

Three decades of writing, performing, listening. Dominik knows his voice now — what it sounds like, what it carries, what it refuses to say. The years between the schoolyard in Yaoundé and the studio in Marbella weren't a delay. They were the work. What You On is the first release of an artist who is finally ready to be heard on his own terms.