Boundary's Proxima Centauri Turns a Star Signal Into Retro-Futurist Quest

Dominican producer Josué Suero, who records as Boundary, has built his new album Proxima Centauri around his most elaborate concept yet: a mysterious message beamed from the star Alpha Centauri that grants its receivers the power of "tapping into unknown possibilities in our reality," allowing them to reshape the world according to their vision.

The record has no score yet from listeners. That gap matters less than the fact that Suero, who began releasing music as a teenager in the late 2010s, has spent nearly a decade refining an uncanny feel for vintage electronica — and this album pushes that project further than anything before it.

What does the album sound like?

Some of Boundary's records channel the plangent synths and knotty drum programming of early Aphex Twin. Others recall the blippy, minimalist house once championed by labels like Spectral Sound and Force Trax. Many of his recordings exist only digitally on Bandcamp, and encountered without context, they could pass for lost relics of the late 1990s or early 2000s — the work, perhaps, of some bedroom producer squirreled away in a remote village in Cornwall or the Black Forest.

What saves the music from appearing overly retro, critics note, is its idiosyncrasy. Much like the artists who inspired him, Suero comes off like an autodidact discovering hidden technological secrets and twisting diverse strands of the electronic canon to his own ends.

A history of loose concepts

Suero is fond of applying loose concepts that guide the shape of his songs:

• The glassy microhouse of 2024's ³com EP was presented as "a small ode to browsing early 2010s internet in the Dominican Republic."
• 2020's Al Tiempo Real riffed on shortwave radio, symbolically putting the power of expression back in the listener's hands.
• Proxima Centauri extends that streak into science-fiction territory with its star-borne transmission premise.

How the RPG premise shapes the tracks

To suit the RPG-like premise, the album's palette often evokes the brittle sonics of vintage video games. "Title Screen" opens the record with a scene-setting sketch for icy synths whose wandering chords and streaks of dissonance convey a feeling of solemn mystery, as though announcing the beginning of a great quest.

From there, Suero zeroes in on more rhythmic territory, each track playing out like a journey in miniature:

• "Quién Nos Podrá Salvar de Esta" could almost pass for Boards of Canada at first, as pitch-warped synths drape woozily over a slow-motion breakbeat, until jazzy, rolling drums pick up the tempo and brighten the colors.
• "Eclipse V" begins as laid-back downbeat house but gathers steam as it goes, twinkling counterpoints filling the empty space above its boom-ticking drum beat.
• In the tumbling "Hidden Resonance," abstracted chirps and rushing 909 snares lay the foundation for increasingly ornate, almost architectural forms built out of interlocking arpeggios and glistening pads.

Whether the Alpha Centauri conceit carries a whole album remains untested — no listener score exists yet. But the concept gives Suero's retro instincts a direction, and the track-by-track architecture suggests an artist converting nostalgia into structure rather than resting on it.