A steady drip of aqueous, IDM-tinted techno has earned Dominican producer Boundary, born José Suero, a place at the vanguard of Santo Domingo’s electronic scene. After picking up a copy of Ableton at 16, the young artist quickly established a signature sound: taut basslines, blockish low-fidelity timbres, and a keen sense of momentum that elevates the standard four-on-the-floor pulse. Boundary’s beats practically glow in the dark with peppy snaps, clicks, pops, and snares, buoyed by evolving melodies that belie a certain melancholia. His most recent full-length, 2024’s Oxido en El Espejo, exemplified this saturnine bent, weaving grim warnings of planetary catastrophe into its track titles. With the new Epicenter Imager EP, Suero maintains focus on the natural world, but pulls back to craft a gentler, more optimistic landscape in which to host another round of masterful atmospheric grooves.

Per the loose terms of its press material, Epicenter Imager meditates on the intersection of nature and technology, telling the story of an ancient, “massive yet subtle” earth-scanning device that allows an island’s minerals to be identified and controlled by its indigenous population. The idea holds a particular resonance in the context of Suero’s native Dominican Republic. It is a country wounded by the ongoing caustic legacy of projects like the Pueblo Viejo mine—the largest commercial gold mine in Latin America—whose toxic runoff regularly creates disastrous environmental scandals. The mythic scanner of Boundary’s speculative universe, then, isn’t just a means of enrichment, but a tool of resilience; in its data lies hope for a future free from colonialist extractivism. The EP’s title track builds around layers of call-and-response patterns that evoke the searching pulse of a sonar wave, chalky pads and blips that stir quickly to life before receding under punchy bass. The natural ebb and flow that permeates so much of Boundary’s work suddenly takes on a more pointed character: each echo of reverb and delay marks a waypoint, a call from long-buried riches waiting to be uncovered.

Of course, Epicenter Imager isn’t a mere exercise in skeuomorphism. Speaking with Pitchfork last spring, Suero resisted straightforward narrativization, preferring not to “inculcate a meaning” in his music for others to glean. The EP is foremost a collection of some of the producer’s most sophisticated and confident work yet, gliding between nocturnal moods that all wink at encroaching surreality. “Llegada al cometa” augments its unhurried stride with detuned synth runs that sound like a chorus of blaring car horns. “Optimal Tree Discovery” scatters glitching percussion across the stereo field like loose puzzle pieces, patching them together with a slurry of cycling chords that ripple over a confident bassline. In sequence, the tracks take on an almost abstract quality, smearing into one another like landscapes seen from a moving train. When the pounding drum breaks of moody downtempo jam “Terrain Compressor” fade into view, they function like hypnic jerks lurching the ear back to reality.