mediopicky is the project of Pablo Alcántara, a Dominican producer, DJ, singer and songwriter born in Santo Domingo on 30 June 1989. He builds electronic music on Caribbean rhythms and refuses to settle on a genre, moving between merengue, dembow, cumbia, trap, rock, hyperpop and reggaetón, and he has drawn more foreign press than almost anyone else working in Dominican music.

Leaving the classroom

He studied advertising and walked away from it. His own account is blunt: the professors wanted to give him fewer classes than he wanted to take, and the whole thing felt out of date. He went on to build a career in advertising anyway, and that work paid for the years he spent on his own sound.

He describes the process as a long one on purpose — always an artist, he says, but constantly changing tools and forms in search of his craft, his sound and his technique, and in no hurry about it.

The international press

The self-titled album of 2022 was the record that carried. Pitchfork, Rolling Stone, KEXP, NPR, Remezcla, Noisey and Mad Decent all took notice, which for a Dominican artist working outside merengue and bachata is unusual on its own.

In March 2023 SXSW invited him to Austin, where he played the Rolling Stone showcase Future of Music and put a live format in front of an audience for the first time after years of building the catalogue digitally. His reason for going was simple: he wanted to get closer to the people who supported him, play concerts, shake hands.

El Precio de la Yuca followed in 2024, a record he used to lay out what he thinks about the present.

Where the sound comes from

He names System of a Down, the first Calle 13 album, the whole moombahton movement and Dominican dembow — a set of influences that explains a catalogue nobody can file cleanly.

His music has gone into film, television, video games and advertising, with credits attached to Netflix, Disney, Prime Video, EA Sports FC, NBA 2K and Apple Arcade. What he says he is after is narrower than all of that: he wants people to feel something, and to dance without worrying about what genre they are hearing.