Alec Mateo is an Amsterdam-based Dominican writer, artist, and musician. Bringing an author's intentionality to the studio, his interests in intertextuality and nonlinearity lace his music with an otherworldly dimension. Mateo's newly released debut album, Polanco Tapes (2025), on Amsterdam label UUUSE, is a fuzzy collage of myriad bristling sounds – from cloudy ambient swells to incisive, mumbled wisdom, these gentle and intimate songs reveal and conceal in equal measure: like a revolving lighthouse signal beaming out into the murky expanse of the sea, Mateo's music cyclically and texturally weaves between smoggy darkness and gleaming light. Warm, burnished tracks of glistening tape-saturation, warped 404 samples, poetic murmurings, and noise-encrusted synthesis build Mateo's distinct sound world of lo-fi R&B, experimental ambience, and smoldering spoken-word.