Boundary Is the Dominican Republic’s Leftfield Techno Prodigy

His most recent full-length is January’s Oxido en el Espejo (Oxide on the Mirror), out on Berlin’s Exotic Robotics imprint. Oxido is a shimmering stream of ambling basslines, chiffon-soft pads, and punchy four-on-the-floor rhythms, culling elements of Detroit techno, Japanese ambient, and everything in between. He started working on some tracks in 2019 but had no idea they would eventually take the shape of a proper LP. At the time, he was confronting his complex feelings about Dominican society, his apocalyptic anxieties, and his lifelong struggle with body dysmorphia. “I’ve always had this thing with my physical self. Looking in the mirror and being like, ‘That’s you, bitch?’” he explains. The album is, in part, “about transcending the physical barrier” of his body by shattering a metaphorical, corroded, and oxidized mirror.

But for him, Oxido is also a doomsday tale, inspired by his “disgust with this country, with the world in general.” The tracklist of Oxido tells a clandestine story about the end of times, narrating the exodus of birds and people from the planet (“Son Quienes Cortan los Cielos Grises” and “Las Aves Ya Saben Donde Ir”). It concludes with a meditation on the remnants of life on Earth, scanning what has been left behind in the rubble (“Global Transpose”). Still, Suero is adamant that the record should be open to the listener’s interpretation. “I don’t really have the need to inculcate a meaning, like ‘It’s this and that’s it,’” he explains. “I like that people can create their own world in these songs.”

Suero first encountered electronic music when he was 4, after his father brought home a pirated PlayStation 1 game called Roll Away. The soundtrack, produced by the Swedish duo Twice a Man, blends ambient-techno, downtempo, and Balearic house. From there, the floodgates opened. His father showed him the Tiësto compilation In Search of Sunrise 5: Los Angeles. His older brother, with whom he shared a room for 17 years, would spend his afternoons digging for new tracks on the now-defunct blog Hype Machine, or listening to mixes from the New York-based multimedia art magazine DIS. Suero would come home from school and they’d spend hours listening to music. “My brother was on top of everything DIS Magazine was doing: all those collaborations and mixes with Nguzunguzu, Total Freedom, Kelela,” he explains. “Everything was allowed, and everything was deconstructed at the same time…That really opened my eyes.” The jagged aesthetics of early 2010s club music inspired him to make tracks of his own. With encouragement from his brother, he started uploading his own productions to SoundCloud at 16, using—you guessed it—a bootleg version of Ableton.