Twenty years ago last month, Burial released his debut EP—and unleashed a ghost. The British producer’s music, shot through with a sense of loss and veiled in vinyl crackle, epitomized a blurry set of ideas about nostalgia and otherworldliness that were bubbling up across a swath of experimental music. Soon, shepherded by critics Mark Fisher and Simon Reynolds, a new term had entered the lexicon: “hauntology.” Borrowed from French postmodernist philosopher Jacques Derrida’s 1993 book Specters of Marx, hauntology, in Fisher’s framing, hovers miasmically over a loose nexus of ideas around melancholy, technology, memory, and capitalism. Examining the work of a number of like-minded artists, including Burial, Philip Jeck, the Caretaker, and the figures behind the Ghost Box label, he later wrote: “Their work sounded ‘ghostly,’ certainly, but the spectrality was not a mere question of atmospherics. What defined this ‘hauntological’ confluence more than anything else was its confrontation with a cultural impasse: the failure of the future.”

As a description of ghostly affect and 21st-century disappointment, hauntology has been a largely British phenomenon—and, despite Fisher’s philosophical intent, has often been invoked mainly to mean, “sounds spooky.” But for those who know where to look, Latin American electronic music has long buzzed with hauntological portent, and with good reason: With its overlapping histories of genocide, colonialism, dictatorship, migration, organized crime, thwarted utopia, and rapacious neoliberalism, Latin America knows a thing or two about failed futures. Numinous energy ripples through the wraithlike voices of Lucrecia Dalt’s Anticlines, No era sólida, and ¡Ay!; it chills the blood in Debit’s The Long Count, which used synthesis and machine learning to resuscitate the sounds of the ancient Maya; it rises like narcotic vapors from the plodding tempos of cumbia rebajada, born when a malfunctioning soundsystem began playing back the upbeat tropical style at a funereal pace and gravelly pitch. (“When you slow down the cumbia,” Nicolás Vallejo, whose work as Ezmeralda filters cumbia rebajada into an ambient haze, once explained, “the ghosts start to emerge.”)

Fantología I, released by the Quito, Ecuador, label +ambién, is framed as a Latin American response to the discourse around hauntology—a discourse that label heads Gregorio Hernández (DJ +1) and Daniel Lofredo (Quixosis) say has too often turned a blind eye to the Global South. The object of their scrutiny is “a very Latin American kind of uncertainty,” they write: “an ever-present ghost that shadows the region in the 21st century.” Where the Global North mourns “lost golden ages”—the sci-fi futurism of the 1960s, the renegade paradise of ’80s rave—they instead “confront the specter of failed statehood, chronic instability, and the fading promise of futures that may never arrive. These tracks reflect on a society forever negotiating a compromised tomorrow—and discovering how to live, even love, within that tension.”