The title alone - "Dungeons of Miami" - paints a picture of a place both mythic and neon-lit, where the subterranean and the sun-drenched coexist in some bizarre, humid symbiosis. This is not the Miami of pastel beach chairs and mojitos but a place where abandoned shopping malls hum with unseen electricity, where echoes of electro, bass, and industrial clatter down forgotten highways. Here, in the depths of "Low End Resorts", Romulo Del Castillo (Phoenecia, Schematic, Warp) and Nick Forte (DFA, Schematic, Kranky) fuse their distinct electronic dialects into a singular, mutating entity - an album that glows like a CRT screen in a darkened room, emitting signals both familiar and alien.

Del Castillo and Forte are veterans of the weirder corners of electronic music, having shaped and reshaped genres over decades. Del Castillo’s legacy in Miami’s IDM and glitch scene - via Phoenecia and the legendary Schematic Records - has long been about fracturing sound into rhythmic puzzles. Forte, coming from the post-punk and experimental realms, brings a raw, textural sensibility, where jagged edges cut through synthetic smoothness. Together, their collaboration is less about nostalgia and more about dredging up the past, distorting it, and sending it through some late-capitalist Florida fever dream.

And what does this dream sound like? The title track, "Dungeons of Miami", kicks things off with an uneasy swagger - squelchy bass lurching under fractured rhythms, like a corrupted Miami bass tape playing in an abandoned warehouse. "RV Spill" oozes with paranoid energy, its drum machines sounding like they’ve been submerged in seawater and left to rust, while "Broken Fiend" is a synthetic dirge, its melody trapped in a loop of mechanical decay.

The album's lone collaboration, "Rise Up", features Greg Beato, another Miami experimentalist with a penchant for blown-out drums and dystopian club aesthetics. Here, the trio builds a pressure-cooker of distorted kicks and submerged vocal fragments, as if the ghosts of rave past were trying to communicate through a malfunctioning PA system. Then there’s "Mall Diamonds", a track that feels like walking through a half-lit shopping center at 3 a.m., the ghosts of 80s consumerism flickering in glass reflections.

As the album progresses, it becomes even more immersive. "Sleeping in the Ocean" offers a moment of almost serene suspension, its submerged pulses evoking the deep, inescapable weight of the sea, before "Oath of Blood" plunges back into metallic percussion and ominous textures. Finally, the closing track, "Anxious Now", stretches out to an expansive 10 minutes, a slow-motion dissolution where rhythms crack, dissolve, and reform - a fittingly uneasy conclusion to this descent into the Miami underworld.

At its core, "Dungeons of Miami" is a love letter to the decayed neon of forgotten futures, an album that pulls from electro, glitch, bass music, and dark ambient without ever settling into any one genre. It’s music for underground parking garages, for empty streets at dawn, for the unsettling feeling that your city is alive in ways you don’t quite understand. In other words, it’s Miami - but not as you know it.

Score: 404/Vice City Not Found