I don't own a record player, but I have a vinyl edition of Mirror River, the first release by Amazondotcom, propped up on a shelf in my apartment. The EP careens between precisely edited field recordings and decomposing dubstep bass wobbles, featuring four concise tracks that clock in at just under 20 minutes in total. One side of the sleeve shows a tawny hound in a lush forest clearing, captured mid-trot, heading towards a wood-framed mirror with a wormhole-like reflection. On the other, a bedroom and the same mirror, this time a portal back into the woods.

This cover soon became a signpost for me. I went to Los Angeles to meet up with Amazondotcom, real name Stella Ahn, one Thursday evening in November last year at the artspace Human Resources. Tucked away on an otherwise quiet street in Chinatown (although I later learned that Skrillex regularly throws ragers around the corner), I knew I was in the right place when I saw that same tawny dog from the album cover seated at the entrance like a friendly bouncer.

I walked up, pet the dog, who I later learned is named Rainbow and is Ahn's near-constant companion, and entered the lobby of the artspace, searching for more signs. I found two. One was taped above an unattended bin of Tecate, asking for a $2 donation to take one, and the other was on the wall: "Go upstairs 4 show." Music was already streaming out of the main room downstairs, and upon entering, I made out in the darkness Siete Catorce, seated on an oversized black floor cushion, DJing off his laptop, flanked by two video projections of cityscapes. Ahn joined him a few moments later, sitting with Rainbow and another laptop. I joined the smattering of people seated on cushions scattered around the room, drinking milky white makgeolli out of green plastic bottles. It didn't feel like an art opening or a club night, but more of a laid-back house party. People would chat a bit, gaze off at the projections, or close their eyes to the music, which was by no means ambient. Early 2000s R&B samples blended into purely percussive overtures, a club set tweaked down to a relaxed BPM. It felt comfortable.

The show was Restaurant, an exhibit co-produced by Ahn along with artist and friend Hyesung ii. Upstairs was a smaller room bathed in orange and blue light, refashioned by the duo with furniture and other household items typically found in Korean households. Some of the objects, including kitchenware and clothing, hung like Dadaist laundry from the ceiling. It was there that, when I returned to the exhibit in the light of a day, Ahn and I slipped off our shoes and sat at the central sang, a small table close to the floor, to chat. Rainbow joined us as well, intermittently gracing me with dog kisses.

Ahn explained to me that the idea behind the installation was to "make a space which is in its essence comfortable to us, our culture." They bought a few of the materials, but many were borrowed, including the table where we sat, which was from her parents' house. She and Hyesung ii found it entertaining to set up what was familiar to them and make it strange, uncanny even, by placing it within a gallery context. The name Restaurant was partly a jab at the rapid gentrification of the Chinatown neighborhood, where locally owned eateries are being bought up and replaced by hip cafes, boutiques and condos. Art spaces are often the first sign of this displacement, however supportive they are of precarious artists, and Ahn pointed out that long-time residents are much less likely to step into the gallery than they are to grab food at the actual pho place directly next door. The videos they had projected behind the DJ sets during the opening were lonely vignettes of street corners in New York City and cantinas in Tijuana, folding in more cultural landscapes.

Continuing a discussion we had begun a few months prior via Skype, I wanted to learn more about her transition from visual art to music. I was surprised to learn she had only come to music relatively recently. "I'm really new to music… I only sat down and started doing it two-and-a-half years ago." She had been living in Tijuana, directly across the border from San Diego, California. She came from a background of making short films and video art, but in Tijuana, she found the practice of filmmaking unwieldy. It took resources—cameras, people, modes of transport—and she was so broke that there were days she couldn't afford a $2 taxi.

She still had her laptop, though, and one day she downloaded a cracked version of Ableton. "For the first time, I didn't need anything except that laptop to create something." She was instantly hooked, making eight tracks in the first seven days. She barely slept, but sleep didn't matter. With those first months being the most intensely creative period, she spoke about making music like it was a new lover. "Right when you're starting out, it's like a honeymoon phase."

Ahn grew up as a self-described introvert, skipping out on the rave scene available in her hometown of LA. Music was something she listened to by herself in her room. Parties in Tijuana showed her how music could be a social, spatial medium. Ruidosón, a nascent style that bent cumbia samples into new techno architectures, was the defining sound at the parties she'd go to. These parties were powered by acts like María y José, who would sing in the middle of a club set—an intimate gesture in a crowded room, one that made an impression on Ahn.

She wasn't altogether unfamiliar with these sounds. Her parents emigrated to LA from South Korea, and the neighborhood she grew up in was "95 percent Mexican and Central American." Blasting banda and cumbia in the streets was commonplace. She's quick to point out that her music isn't directly influenced by these genres, but that hearing artists in Tijuana use music to "do something with their culture in a new and mutated way" opened her ears to novel artistic possibilities.

Ahn also found music more accessible for an audience than the work her art school training had pushed her to make. She actively resists the self-referential narrative of the introverted bedroom producer. "I don't ever want to be the person that's so introverted that I don't know how to make music for other people," she said. Her modus operandi for art is that 90 percent of it comes from the person who is consuming it, so when she first uploaded her tracks to SoundCloud and saw her number of listens pass 100 in one day, she felt like she had finally found a medium that would reach people. (By comparison, only a few people had passed through the Restaurant installation that day.)

Her creative practices are tied together by an acute spatial awareness. With regard to music, Ahn's process is anti-formulaic. "I don't like the idea of setting out an idea first before making a project or sound… then you try to make something to fill those brackets." She considers sounds as spaces to inhabit rather than a timeline to fill. "Physical space, how they feel in a room, what direction they are going and how they sit in a room." That is to say, she literally moves around and sits in different areas of a room, letting the sound hit from all possible angles.

Ahn's production process has slowed considerably since those early days in Tijuana, as she's shifted her focus to paring down the elements on a track. "I put a lot on a track, then it's just a matter of going in and erasing the things that are unnecessary," she said. What counts as unnecessary? "Things that don't add to the feeling of the song, the physical feeling of it in a space." Slowing down was also a conscious choice to avoid burnout from sleepless nights of partying, producing and playing shows. These days she sleeps a lot more and works a full-time, "regular-ass job" in a film history archive. Before the global pandemic hit, that made it difficult to find time to tour, but stability has its benefits. "Now I'm just trying to be smart about it and keep myself healthy so I can use the best version [of a track]."

This spare and spatial style of production defines Mirror River. Shifting frequencies abound, between dubstep-level bass and high-end samples that bubble, squelch and decompose into a semblance of melody. Blurring the boundaries between the synthetic and organic, the digital and the corporeal, is very à la mode for narratives in music and art, but this record pulls it off without pretensions.

Ahn points to her years spent living on-and-off in South Korea as a major influence. Having spent time in both Seoul, the capital, and Daegu, South Korea's fourth-largest city, technology was inescapable. But she also spent time in the countryside, traveling through the provinces of Jeolla and Gangwon, and discovered that technocratic urban culture wasn't as pervasive as it seemed. In rural areas, a different set of tools had held out, one with older origins. She became interested in shamanism as an alternative mode of possessing and proliferating knowledge. "I'm always interested in ideas that aren't based at all in Western knowledge," she said. The sharp contrast between urban and rural culture, those who live a digitally immersed life and others for whom magic permeates the everyday, spawned a specific feeling that music could address.

Mirror River was the first release off of Ahn's own label, Subreal, which she cofounded last year with Marco Gutierrez, AKA Siete Catorce. Gutierrez had wanted to launch a label for years, but the pieces had never quite fallen together. He and Ahn met in passing in Tijuana, but only started working together when he had reached out to her on SoundCloud, after she had moved back to LA. They made an EP together in 2018 called Teardropz.

"The sounds just went so well together and it was so easy," Ahn said. She felt that doing a label together would work because of a shared aesthetic sensibility. She's most excited by finding artists in the "honeymoon period" with their music, before they settle down with a particular sound and self-brand. "It's nice finding people who haven't released officially yet, to be a platform for artists like that." They make up for the label's small size and tight budget with uncut persistence. "Marco bothers every single person to send tracks to us."

Subreal released two EPs in 2019, Mirror River and Mexican producer El Irreal Veintiuno's Poliformo. Subreal's third release, In Tongues, by the Mexico City-based coder/musician CNDSD, was released in April and forged together in true algorave style over several live-coded events. Today their network runs from LA to Central Mexico, but Ahn stresses that she won't let geography confine the label. They're leveraging networks of friends now, but don't want to be pigeonholed by a specific sound or place.

Ahn and Gutierrez collaborate frequently. They have a live show together, share an agent, and Gutierrez mixed Mirror River (along with the other two Subreal releases). I spoke with them individually on separate occasions about their impressions of their partnership. They speak of each other with a mix of casual awe and mutual respect. Both used the exact same words to describe the other's music: "I had never heard anything like it before."

I last exchanged emails with Ahn just as LA was imposing its first round of COVID-19 lockdown measures. The three of them—Ahn, Gutierrez and Rainbow—share a studio apartment and have been adapting to using headphones while working. Working from home is both a challenge and a privilege many of us are experiencing lately, but Ahn told me in the past that she feels most comfortable and creative working in close quarters. "I feel strongly that I'm the best at what I do in the studio or in my room, working with myself or with one or two people."

The peculiar sonic space carved out by Mirror River and the intimacy of the Restaurant installation began to make more sense. "I always prioritize the sensory to any narrative," she said. "It's most important for the song to capture your senses." Ahn makes these spaces to suit her particular worldview, but others are invited to occupy them as well.