Placer

The debut release on Sarah Tonin Records out of Miami, and the label’s debut too — STR001. Juaan is Juan Manuel Fernandez from Mar del Plata, Argentina, born in 1998 and producing since around 2018. Four tracks of electro-techno you can’t place in any particular decade. In techno that means they’ll last.

The sound sits in the Kraftwerk-to-Drexciya electro continuum — 808 drums, snaking acid basslines, synths that sound like they were programmed in a submarine. His later EP on Melcure was called A.R.G.: Advanced Rhythm Generator, which is the kind of Roland-machine reference that tells you exactly where his head is. But the execution has a warmth and looseness that separates it from the more rigid European electro tradition. Ben UFO plays his records.

He’s part of a growing wave of South American producers — Argentine, Colombian, Brazilian — who’ve broken into the European vinyl circuit without passing through the usual Berlin or London residencies first. Releases on labels in Barcelona, London, Cairo, Amsterdam, and now Miami, all within two years. The network is genuinely global in a way the previous generation’s wasn’t.