Boundary is Josué Suero, and he started putting tracks on SoundCloud from Santo Domingo late in 2015. He was still a teenager when his first album, ‘Fantasmagórico’, went out on El Cuarto Elástico in 2017.
Bandcamp Daily spoke to him that same year. Boundary: “I just did my thing. When I looked up 50 minutes later the whole room was filled with people and I was like, ‘Oh my God!’ I couldn’t believe it. I’m super shy, but when I’m playing I become a different person.”
‘Óxido En El Espejo’ followed in 2024. He has played NTS and Rinse, and Pitchfork, Mixmag and Resident Advisor have all written him up. He names Dean Blunt as a hero, and cites Argentinian electronic music from the turn of the century.
The new one has a premise. The star in the title beams a program down to earth, the listener is the user who receives it, and somewhere in its functions sits the power to change the course of the world. Eight tracks, with the titles moving between Spanish and English. Digital and a twelve inch.
Point Records was started by Dominicans in Los Angeles in 2016 and works out of Santo Domingo, building artists across the Dominican Republic, Haiti and the United States. Kelman Durán and Diego Raposo are on it too.
Boundary: “In our current times, evil seems to prevail without end. There is an air of hopelessness, and we have to deal with an immense sense of powerlessness in our day-to-day. I hope this record can somehow bring some level of hope and faith in ourselves during these very dark times.”
Before we jump into our own interpretation of the album, we thought we’d give some context in terms of how Boundary conceptualised the album. In the press release’s words: “Named after the star closest to our sun, the album casts the listener as ‘the user’ who receives a mysterious, otherworldly program beamed down from the star itself. As the user explores its functions, they uncover one possibility: the power to reshape the course of the world.”
This would explain why, the moment we heard the first chiptune-style chord of opening track ‘Title Screen’, we were propelled back in time an… undisclosed number of years… and were sat in front of a CRT screen fully immersed in Commodore Amiga games. The title screen in question presumably being that of the ‘program’ described above.
This is the perfect segue into the lo-fi, low-slung intro of ‘Quien Nos Podrá Salvar De Esta’ (translated as Who Can Save Us From This?), which blooms out into a stunning breakbeat excursion, loaded with atmospheric ambience thanks to those breathy synths.
‘Eclipse V’ is up next, its relaxed house beat carrying dreamy pads and a bumpy little bassline before the track starts to glitch only noticeably enough to snap you out of the haze the first half conjured.
‘Hidden Resonance’ enters the sound space next, with techno percussion providing the momentum underneath an energetic, playful synth line that dances as much as it encourages the listener to do so.
We are presumably approaching Proxima Centauri now, as we reach ‘END OF PARSEC’. Our momentum slows to a jazzy breakbeat cruise as we exit the warp speed of the previous track as we draw closer to our solar system’s nearest star. The synth pulses for signs of life on our approach.
The monumental ‘Clearly Defined Results’ comes in at only 2 minutes, but its soaring synths and majestic drums really convey a sense of something gigantic in size. Perhaps our first real glimpse of Proxima Centauri.
This breaks out into the opening guitar plucks of penultimate track ‘Soul Hacker’, which sit upon lilting string pad swells, whose shuffling breakbeat percussion doesn’t kick in until the second half to rouse the listener for the album’s close.
And what a close it is. ‘Así Nos Han Dejado Todo’ or ‘This Is How They’ve Left Everything for Us’ offers a cinematic close to proceedings, through its deft synth work and return to the video game music theme as we download our physical forms into the program for eternity.