If you are an L.A.-area musician who would like to submit unreleased songs or videos of any genre for premiere, email a stream or download link to fortherecord@larecord.com.

Like the title suggests, L.A. producer/polymath Dot‘s “Long Distance” covers a lot of ground. It’s something of an exercise in practical possibilites, she says, and here she deploys her considerable experience as a producer (and as a music production teacher) to demonstrate exactly how to turn a little into a lot. Her coming Atomic Age mixtape—due out Fri., June 21, on her own Unspeakable Records—was put together with a portable production set up during two years of transcontinental travel, and even as an instrumental, “Long Distance” works as a sort of mission statement. In three minutes, Dot moves through a whole landscape of sound—peaks, valleys, chasms, spires and maybe even cloud forests, all built from the pixels up—with the musical equivalent of an ultralight backpack, and shows the power of vision and experience combined with precision tech. As she explains:

“This song resulted from some drastic shifts in the way I’ve been living my life over the past couple of years. In 2017 I downsized a lot of my material possessions to prioritize travel and education, and wanted to challenge myself to create music using as few tools and resources as possible. This song was produced, mixed, and mastered entirely with my laptop and cheap headphones, and I designed all of the sounds from scratch using Ableton synths and some field recordings from Morocco.

There have been a lot of interesting discussions around digital music tech lately—whether or not it’s cheapening the quality of modern music and oversaturating the markets—so I wanted to create a record that in some way demonstrates the benefits of affordable music technology and its widespread availability. I believe that our musical traditions and cultures are further uplifted when more people have easier access to tools that allow them to create and share their music. And while I have no way of proving this, I think that the dramatic increase in the number of women producing their own music is somehow related to this more recent affordability, since historically we have been ranked far lower on socioeconomic scales than our male counterparts.”

Atomic Age will be out on Unspeakable next month—watch for it here, and follow dot here!