Before Emra Grid, there was Saved Once Twice, released under his own name by Ki Records in 2014. Its samples drew on films, cartoons and music from well beyond electronic production. The record took shape across Brooklyn, Barcelona and Berlin; one piece, “Reaper”, was made in a Brooklyn closet because that was the space available for a studio. That early habit of making something personal from borrowed fragments is worth remembering here. More than a decade later, his Secret Thirteen mix takes it into an unusually expansive form.

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The Emra Grid name appeared on Opal Tapes with The Same Face in 2016. Records for LINE, Schematic and Banned In Vegas followed, alongside a continuing relationship with Opal. More recently, Mente was composed and mixed in Barcelona in 2025. Eleven Finns, released by LINE in April 2026, was also made there. Its credits contain two telling details: the title piece grew around recordings of a circuit-bent Yamaha PortaSound PS-400, while “Alway Season” was made entirely with a broken MEGAfm MKII. Even before getting to the mix, there is a sense of someone interested in what happens when an instrument stops behaving as expected.

From Opal to LINE

Two points in Sean’s own catalogue.

Free jazz in another dimension

On the first listen, I kept losing any sense of what era I was in. Flutes, voices and percussion seemed to come from somewhere very far away, then an electronic texture would bend the whole scene out of shape. At one point I imagined flooded tunnels opening into a lonely bar in a noir film, its piano sounding slightly wrong. A trace of the old Blade Runner atmosphere would appear, then give way to something closer to Robert Gardner’s Forest of Bliss, where the sounds of everyday life and ritual carry the film. These were pictures forming in my head. The mix kept giving me enough to recognise something, then taking it somewhere I hadn’t expected.

I wrote to Sean before seeing his tracklist. “Free jazz in another dimension” was the closest I could get to parts of it. There was something in the breath, the distortion and those strange spatial effects that made familiar instruments feel newly unfamiliar. Almost seventy-two minutes passed this way. For all the changes in scale and mood, I never felt the story coming apart.

That sense of continuity took work. Sean has brought together a selection that reaches from Rahsaan Roland Kirk and recordings of Kuria flute playing to Geinoh Yamashirogumi, KADAPAT and Shackleton. But the list only begins to explain what happens here. He loops and processes the recordings, brings them back in fragments and threads his own music through the gaps. Some of those gaps disappear altogether.

“I wanted the mix to have a section, or a few sections, with several tracks playing simultaneously without being able to distinguish them, or just create something new, treating each track like a stem of a track.”

Sean Piñeiro / Emra Grid

His notes give sixty-six entries, including returning passages, film dialogue and eleven separate appearances of his synths. There are stretches where several sources occupy the same minutes. Looking at the timings after listening is a small shock. Something that seemed to belong to one recording turns out to have arrived from another, while a third has been underneath it for a while. The tracklist becomes a way of going back into the sound and hearing the construction differently.

We had talked about this approach months before the mix arrived. Sean described working on a mix much as he would work on a track, changing the audio, looping it, stretching it and adding his own sounds. He spent more than a month thinking about this one and gathering material before assembling it over roughly a week. Some decisions were already very clear. He wanted flute music, percussion and field recordings. He wanted the pan flute from Ennio Morricone’s “Childhood Memories” to keep looping. He also wanted Kirk, heavily distorted.

“I’ve been collecting jazz vinyl since I was a teenager, and almost every time I get to make a mix, I take the chance to throw some in. Rahsaan Roland Kirk is the man.”

Sean Piñeiro / Emra Grid

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The original idea involved Kirk playing two saxophones at once. Going through his records led Sean to keep adding more. “The Inflated Tear” returns, “Rahsaanic” and “I Loves You Porgy” enter the early part of the mix, and fragments of “Mary McLeod Bethune” surface later. Alongside Chico Hamilton, Randy Weston and Bendik Giske, these passages give my first impression of displaced jazz some recognisable names. Kirk also gives the selection a personal history. This is music Sean has spent years collecting, now pulled into the same working space as his own synth recordings.

His relationship with jazz also reaches back to teenage trips to New York with friends. Seeing Mingus Dynasty left him with a feeling he wanted in this mix, a controlled chaos that seems on the verge of coming apart before it comes together again. He points to The Black Saint and the Sinner Lady as an example of that tension.

There is an older story that makes me smile in this context. In a 2014 selection for HHV, Sean recalled playing Morton Feldman’s “Slow Waltz” in a Brooklyn bar when a listener threatened to pour beer over his computer. Sean himself had needed repeated listens to find his way into the piece. In the same selection he discussed jazz, Meredith Monk and Eduard Artemyev’s film music. Those interests have had a long time to grow into one another.

Breath is one of the things I keep following through it. Ron Korb’s “Song of Sunda” appears near the beginning, overlapping “Pressure Chords – A” by John McCowen with Lucy Railton and Weston Olencki. Later come two different recordings of “Umwere (Closed Transverse Flute)” from Music of Kuria and the Gusii of Western Kenya, and a brief passage of T. R. Mahalingam. Those flute sounds connect with the saxophones in the ear, even as the recordings retain their very different histories. Distortion and repetition make their edges harder to place. A sound can feel intimate and physically close, then seem to be coming from deep inside some impossible room.

Voices that return

There are human voices to follow too. Dialogue from Days of Heaven and Dark City keeps returning. Sean traces his wish to sample Linda Manz’s narration from Days of Heaven back to watching the film more than fifteen years ago. He hears narration like this, or the voices in Sans Soleil and A Clockwork Orange, almost as poetry, a character in its own right. Dark City enters for a different reason. For him its science-fiction film noir belongs with the sound world of the selection.

Voices and cinema were already part of his own records. “A Platform”, released by Opal in 2020, was built around a reading of Sylvia Plath’s “Tulips”. How To Replace Personal Growth, his 2022 release for Banned In Vegas, took its inspiration from Todd Haynes’s Safe. “The Great Manipulator”, which appears later in this mix, comes from that record. The film references here extend a conversation he has been having in his own work for years.

Film and moving images

Two releases discussed in the article; only the numbered passages appear in this mix.

The opening choral piece by Georgy Sviridov was one of his last decisions. Sean wanted a different musical setting behind the Days of Heaven voice each time it appeared. He had already closed the mix with Sviridov before deciding to open it with the same music. The recurring voices, including Mary McLeod Bethune from a Rahsaan Roland Kirk record, gave him the sense of moving between rooms in the same building. The final choice, he stresses, was intuitive.

That detail explains something I felt throughout the listen. A familiar voice doesn’t necessarily bring us back to familiar ground. By the time it returns, the music around it has altered the mood. The speaker is recognisable, but the scene has changed. The film fragments give us a recurring human presence without fixing all these sounds to one story already told elsewhere.

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Music carried from Jogja

Indonesia is a more concrete point of connection. Sean lived in Jogja for two or three years, an experience he says changed his view of music forever. His “the river race” comes from Five Cycles Through an Empty Chamber, made during his first weeks in Yogyakarta in spring 2020. “seneca” appears on Threatening Omens in the Clouds, also written and recorded there. Both enter a stretch of the mix that includes KADAPAT, Ossia and David Edren’s “Karawitan”.

Seeing Senyawa in Berlin helped him choose Yogyakarta. Once there, the music was also part of daily life. He remembers pulling over while cycling to listen to gamelan, and children drumming through the streets at four in the morning during Ramadhan. Alongside encountering Senyawa and Raja Kirik in their hometown, those everyday sounds stayed with him.

His time there also produced a collaboration with Thomas Henning, who worked with him on a video for every track of Extended Preservation, released by Schematic in December 2021. Sean has been sharing those videos on Instagram, revisiting a part of his work that had not previously had much room to be seen. The connection between sound and moving images runs through his practice well beyond this selection.

Edren’s Electronic Gamelan Music approaches its inspiration through electronic sequencing, with patterns whose timing can be varied. He describes the work as an impression of that inspiration rather than a representation of traditional music. Placed near Sean’s recordings from his years in Jogja, it opens another route through a musical interest that has become part of his life. Sean knew before starting that Indonesian music would have a substantial place here.

Much later, “Kaneda” from Akira makes that connection audible again. I recognised the soundtrack on my first listen, but Sean’s explanation gives its placement another significance. He chose it as a deliberate return to the Indonesian music heard earlier, pointing to the Balinese jegog in its sound. What first felt like a sudden opening into an anime world was also a connection running back through the mix. His own “a faint glow” begins before “Kaneda” has finished, carrying that passage into his music.

Recordings from Yogyakarta

Follow these two releases back from the layers in the mix.

The field recordings matter to this construction as much as the more immediately recognisable pieces. There are the Kuria flute recordings, Groupe Folklorique Temaeva, and a New Year prayer recorded in San Pablo Chalchihuitán, Chiapas. Sean identifies 39:33–48:08 as one of the sections where he tries to make something new from several different recordings, using the prayer to hold them together.

His account makes the layers more tangible. He takes only a small passage of bells or chimes from 2562, while Giske, percussion and his synths occupy the same space. He recalls adding Mustapha Tettey Addy’s “Dum-Tititi, Dum-Titi” and distorting it until it sounded like a motor about to blow up. Distortion and granulators recur throughout the mix. He gives the looping and mangling of Morricone’s pan flute at 07:33–08:34 as another example. The credits let us follow those sounds back to the people and places behind them once the mix has carried us elsewhere.

An ending found by listening

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The difficult part, Sean says, was finding room for the ambient music. He worried about how it would sit with the percussion, flutes and jazz. His own synth recordings helped hold these different materials together. They were made mostly on a friend’s 1980s Elka Synthex in Berlin, recorded for future sampling; many of them also went into Extended Preservation.

“SALA” and “Reaching the Tall Grass” form long overlapping passages near the middle, with film voices and additional synths passing through them. “SALA” samples the same Morricone album as “Childhood Memories”, a connection Sean thinks would be hard to hear without being told. He made “Reaching the Tall Grass” around the same time as the mix and feels the two are tied together. Here we hear his composition taking shape alongside his listening.

There was also an earlier ending. After three days of working on the mix, Sean thought he had finished with “The Great Manipulator”, around the point that now falls just before “Kaneda”. A couple of days of listening convinced him something was missing. He wanted to move further into contemporary electronic production while keeping contact with the sounds already introduced.

He kept returning to 2562’s “Jerash Hekwerken” and Shackleton’s “Crushing Realities”. Their raw percussion suggested hand drumming to him, and the title of the Shackleton piece connected with Dark City. His own “Sat Cue Forminant”, forthcoming on Adepta Editions alongside “Reaching the Tall Grass”, found its place in that company. The final stretch came from listening again and recognising that there was still somewhere to go.

Sean first discovered Secret Thirteen after moving to Berlin in 2012, around the time he began making ambient music. He told me that contributing a mix had been on his mind for years. When it finally arrived, he thanked me for leaving the deadline open. Hearing about the month of preparation, the abandoned ending and the extra days spent listening back, I’m glad we did.

Max Ernst’s The Eye of Silence comes to mind here. Its rocks, plants and architectural fragments seem to grow from the same surface, forms Ernst drew out of transferred paint textures. Sean’s loops and processed recordings do something similar. Voices and instruments retain traces of where they came from, while the landscape around them keeps changing.

By the time Sviridov returns, that first voice has travelled through several different musical settings. I recognise the beginning, but my head is full of everything that has happened in between. There are records I want to hear on their own and passages I want to take apart with the tracklist beside me. For now, I keep going back to the whole thing. The strange part is how familiar it starts to feel without becoming any easier to place.

From listening to making

The artist behind OTTOMAN GRÜW is Ivan Grünewald, a French-Italian musician whose project began with jam sessions as a Paris duo in early 2017. It became a solo project after he moved to Montreal. Taking it into his own hands gave him room to develop a more precise sound. Roughly five years in the city left a particular mark before his move to Brussels in late 2022. Speaking to Rust in 2024, he recalled becoming absorbed in electro and EBM before fully understanding their histories. Living there sharpened his ear for the relationships between post-punk, coldwave, techno and experimental ambient. Police des mœurs, Xarah Dion, SARIN and Absolute Body Control were among the artists he named. All reappear here.

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His way into making music was practical and uncertain. Going to clubs and raves made him want to create music for those environments. He bought secondhand, partly broken synthesisers and began with little technical knowledge. Digital production and sound engineering came later. Asked about his essential tools, he singled out a Shure SM58. He uses the microphone for singing and to turn the human voice into atmospheric sounds.

Once he found the geographical angle, the selection came together in a couple of hours. He recorded it in one take. Montreal, Brussels, Berlin and Paris provide the main coordinates, but the connections run through people. A collaboration brings another musician into view. Following their label can lead to music from another city or period. Grünewald describes Montreal as crucial to recognising these crossings between scenes, and Mutant Modality as his way of encouraging them in Brussels.

That thinking gives thirty-nine records a convincing continuity across two hours. The intensity rises, subsides and gathers again. A dark atmosphere remains as heavy rhythms give way to quieter, more fragile passages.

“These tracks are brought together because they tell us something about these intersecting stories.”

OTTOMAN GRÜW / on making the mix

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Montreal in the records

He usually begins with ambient music, including when playing live or DJing for an audience. Here the opening selection is Éliane Radigue’s “Occam Ocean XVI”, drawn from Octopus, the 2019 release on which harpist Hélène Breschand performs Radigue and Kasper T. Toeplitz. Jessica Moss’s “One, Now” follows. Sustained attention and instrumental resonance are already at the foundation of the selection. Moss’s piece also contains a geographical connection of its own. The Montreal violinist’s recording includes percussion by Tony Buck, recorded by Rabih Beaini at Morphine Raum in Berlin. The relationship between those cities exists inside the record’s production history.

More connections between Montreal musicians emerge as the selection unfolds. Marie Davidson, present early through Orphx, returns much later as one half of Les Momies de Palerme. The other half is Xarah Dion, whose solo “Volte-Face” sits directly before the duo’s “Incarnation”. Davidson and Dion formed Les Momies in Montreal in 2006 and helped establish the collective arts space La Brique. Their album Brûlez ce coeur was recorded by Godspeed You! Black Emperor’s Dave Bryant. Godspeed will eventually close this mix. These credits reveal people moving between solo work, collaboration and the spaces that supported them. A voice encountered in one context acquires another history further along.

Montreal connections

Four Constellation releases connect the mix’s opening, its later string-led passages and its final selection.

A shared language

The artists who reappear across the mix give its harder passages a personal history too. Orphx appear through their own work, their collaboration with Ancient Methods as Eschaton, and the A Body Without remix. SARIN reworks The Soft Moon’s “Ill”. Front 242’s “Red Team” follows, then SARIN’s own “Ecstasy & Death”. That small run places a foundational Belgian EBM group between two appearances by an artist whose X-IMG label has released OTTOMAN GRÜW’s music. Records that established a language sit beside musicians who continue to alter it. Following those relationships leads back into Grünewald’s own catalogue.

Industrial connections

Orphx, Ancient Methods, Front 242 and SARIN connect Belgian EBM history with the music around Grünewald today.

Inside his own work

Nine selections involve his own projects, including remixes, and four are marked unreleased. They bring his solo music, collaborations and ambient work into the same mix. OTTOMAN GRÜW developed around intense live performance, setting sharp rhythms and heavy bass against atmospheric sound and noisy vocal work. It served as an emotional anchor. Over time, the boundaries between the project and his personal identity have become less clear. “Under My Skin, I Carry Your Bones”, featuring Prophän, comes from Womb, released by X-IMG in 2024. Grünewald described that record through bodily vulnerability, impermanence and an uncertain relationship with the divine. Its collaborators included Prophän and Incendie, both represented elsewhere in this mix. Those concerns extend into the larger selection, where an abrasive musical language can also become something sustaining.

The people behind a favourite record are now reworking something he helped write.

A Body Without began with a chance meeting at Magasin 4 in December 2022. Newly arrived in Brussels, Grünewald went alone to a show featuring L.F.T., Autumns, Sophie du Palais and Bound By Endogamy. He started talking to someone about Orphx, Ancient Methods and aufnahme + wiedergabe. Neither initially knew the other made music. Then they realised they already knew each other’s projects. The stranger was 2+2=5. By June 2026, their duo had released its first EP on aufnahme + wiedergabe, with an Orphx remix. The musicians and label they had talked about that first night had become part of their own record.

For Grünewald, the project remains a meeting place grounded in friendship and the act of making something together. In this mix, 2+2=5’s own “Crossing the Abyss” follows Orphx’s reworking of “Panoptikon”. Later, Substencia and NIGH/T\MARE offer two further perspectives on the duo through their interpretations of “Sigil”.

Another connection began onstage at Tank in Bologna. There Grünewald met Tina, who records as Night in Athens. A shared taste for dark music and their Italian roots helped them connect immediately. A few months later, she wrote and recorded vocals for “Scar”, an unreleased track from his forthcoming release. In the mix, it leads directly into Ancient Methods’ “Burn the Frame”, also featuring Night in Athens. Her voice connects his own collaboration with the Ancient Methods track that follows.

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Some of these relationships also run through this journal. Orphx, SARIN, Ancient Methods and 6SISS have each contributed mixes to Secret Thirteen. Orphx included Godspeed alongside their industrial and experimental influences in 2012. SARIN returned to electro-industrial records he felt the newer revival had overlooked. When aufnahme + wiedergabe joined our Spotlight series in 2014, Philipp Strobel brought an interview and a mix drawn from the label’s recent and forthcoming releases. Ancient Methods was already part of that selection. Listening to OTTOMAN GRÜW, we encounter these people again through music they have passed on and work they are making together. The archive holds different stages of those relationships, with each selection adding another perspective.

His work with Mutant Modality gives Brussels a strong presence in the mix. Mutant Modality, founded in 2023 and run by Grünewald with NVDP, supplies records throughout the selection. Its Control & Collapse release brings together 6SISS and Elaina Vierce, two artists rooted in the city’s alternative electronic scene. The Torn Relics remix of 6SISS’s “None Will Guess”, the original “Think of Something” and Vierce’s “Plasma Veins” appear at separate points. In his own 2017 mix for this journal, 6SISS explored Belgian EBM and industrial recordings, including obscure cassette releases. Nearly a decade later, his new work appears on a Brussels label co-founded by a musician still exploring that heritage. Releases from the label appear throughout the mix alongside earlier influences. Alongside its events and radio activity, Mutant Modality gives other musicians a place to release and share their work.

His work and his label

These four releases bring together his own projects, their collaborators and the Brussels label he co-founded.

The slower current

Theatre of Light began with two ambient concerts under his own name in Brussels in 2023 and 2024, alongside Julia Dyck and Stefan Christoff from Montreal’s experimental scene. It gave him room to explore a quieter practice beyond the club environment. At the second concert, in the chapel of Grand Hospice, he recorded both the direct signal from the mixer and its acoustic reverberation in the space. He combined the two recordings into the six-track release that became the project’s 2024 debut.

For the studio work that followed, he wanted to develop the vocals further. Incendie contributed guitar drones, drawing on their shared love of post-rock. The unreleased “This Day Will Come” comes from that completed album. It sits here beside We Are Winter’s Blue and Radiant Children and Saltland. Radigue and Godspeed are among Theatre of Light’s stated influences. They also frame this mix, with his own work somewhere between them.

The musicians in this quieter stretch of the mix are connected too. We Are Winter’s Blue and Radiant Children includes Godspeed’s Efrim Manuel Menuck and Big Brave’s Mat Ball. Saltland is cellist Rebecca Foon’s project. On “Forward Eyes I”, Warren Ellis contributes alongside her. These recordings approach intensity through sustained sound, repetition and the distinctive textures of the instruments. They help make sense of Grünewald’s daily attachment to drone, post-rock, post-metal and experimental folk. This is the listening that gives him peace and keeps his imagination working. These records are as important to his musical identity as EBM.

What the music makes possible

The political dimension has a history in his activity outside the studio. In 2020, Grünewald and Louis Paulhus began Dance Across Borders, a compilation initiative supporting Solidarité sans frontières. The third volume’s launch took place in a Montreal church basement. Event proceeds were shared between that organisation and Milton Park Food Bank. Here, the relationships music creates had a practical use. People put together a compilation, found a room and passed the money on to others who needed it. When his current statement speaks about collective strength and finding a home, there is experience behind the words.

“The feeling that we cannot lose because we are too many to fight.”

OTTOMAN GRÜW / on the mix

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In January 2022, during the pandemic, Grünewald took the train from Montreal to Halifax to visit friends in Port Mouton on the Nova Scotia coast. The journey took around twenty hours. He remembers being one of the few passengers, travelling through frozen landscapes before reaching the Atlantic. He was hearing G_d’s Pee AT STATE’S END! for the first time. After the long opening piece, the guitar figure of “Fire at Static Valley” arrived. In his recollection, it heightened the sense of cold and isolation. The experience was painful and beautiful at once.

Later that year, he moved to Brussels. That same Godspeed piece now closes this mix, carrying the memory of the train journey alongside the relationships and music that followed it. Ascent and dissent remain close together, the desire to be carried somewhere by sound alongside an unwillingness to accept the world as it stands.

For Secret Thirteen, this is what makes the selection worth preserving alongside his own releases. It holds the records he sought out, the people he came to work with and music still waiting to be released. Those two Orphx appearances contain that movement in miniature. First, a favourite record. Later, the same artists reworking a piece he co-wrote. Between them, years of finding his way into the music. The mix lets listeners follow those connections for themselves.

OTTOMAN GRÜW on the mix

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In this mix, I wanted to bring together artists connected to places where I have spent time, alongside some of my own creations as OTTOMAN GRÜW, A Body Without and Theatre of Light. These places have influenced my journey through their landscapes, history, spiritual and religious life, social and economic conditions, and overall atmosphere. Above all, their music scenes, friendships and connections have shaped me.

The selection is neither exhaustive nor representative. There is a particular focus on the mark left by half a decade living within Montreal’s underground community, my connections with Berlin and my ongoing integration into Brussels’ music scene. I am still trying to understand the city’s strong heritage of dark music. The mix also includes fragments from the first three years of Mutant Modality, the Brussels-based label I co-founded.

In this mix, as in life, there are bursts of joy and shy splendour, often enveloped in darkness. There is also hope, light hidden in the details. The feeling that we cannot lose because we are too many to fight. The feeling of being out of place while still finding home where the heart is. The feeling of an introspective euphoria that these genres know so well.

Most of the releases come from the last two decades, with a few exceptions. There is EBM, industrial techno and broken structures influenced by rhythmic noise, alongside modern, club-inflected and sometimes cheeky post-punk and coldwave hybrids. There is also the music that brings me peace, serenity and keeps the inspiration flowing. I listen to ambient drone and its post-rock, post-metal and experimental folk derivatives every day without getting tired of them.

This is a wide selection of music that feels heavy, fragile and emotional. At times it is rigorously cold, brutal and, in a way, hedonistic. Together, it bridges a gap between alienation and transcendence. That gap is the main focus of my sound research.

Thank you for listening. Feel the pain, feel your heart, never give up hope.

Building the room

The commission began with Hayes’s response to TRSSX’s STM 314. The invitation that followed asked for something slow, corroded and dungeon-deep, not a snapshot of the moment but a structure capable of surviving it, excavated rather than made. Hayes answered by translating that image into three tensions already embedded in his own production: rhythmic noise against glitch, atonality against cinematic form, and lo-fi sludge against clean precision.

This patience is central to Simon Hayes’s work as Swarm Intelligence. Born in Dublin and based in Berlin since 2009, Hayes came through the gravitational fields of bass music and techno, while studies in engineering and artificial intelligence sharpened an attention to systems, failure and the behaviour of complex signals. The project was conceived partly as an escape from uniform four-to-the-floor logic. Its early recordings used speed, raw distortion and rhythmic noise as tools suited to illegal raves, squats and damaged rooms. The albums Faction and Rust, released by Ad Noiseam in 2014 and 2015, consolidated that language without domesticating it. Later work for Voitax, Instruments of Discipline, Natural Selection and his self-titled Swarm Intelligence imprint did not abandon the original problem. It moved around it, testing how much atmosphere, broken rhythm, bass pressure and cinematic space a harsh sound could contain without becoming illustrative.

The discography therefore makes more sense as an investigation than a stylistic progression. Hayes has sampled scrapyards, abandoned power infrastructure and metal sculpture parks. In the Home Recordings project, coil pickup microphones converted the electromagnetic activity of household appliances into sound. Physical objects enter as evidence, then broken circuits and digital processing push that evidence past recognition. The result is precise but never sterile. His engineering knowledge does not remove dirt from the signal. It makes dirt structurally legible. That same method governs this selection. Rhythmic noise, electroacoustic composition, dub-informed negative space, industrial techno and synthetic melody are not arranged as separate scenes. They are different states of matter subjected to the same pressure.

The immediate architectural reference is Kraftwerk Berlin, the former power station where Berlin Atonal resumed in 2013 and where Hayes has repeatedly experienced sound as something larger than a frontal image. Its concrete chambers, extreme reverberation and brutalist scale teach a particular kind of listening. A kick may be a point of impact, but its decay belongs to the building. A drone is not a background, but a volume one enters. Hayes carried that memory into a deliberately restricted setup of two turntables, a mixer and a reverb pedal. No additional production disguises the sources. The pedal does not become an effects arsenal. It acts more like the absent room, extending one record until it contaminates the next and allowing the imagined architecture to function as a third deck.

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“I played around with the idea of tones and melodies being revealed through, and engulfed in noise, abstract/unsteady rhythms forming and deforming, shifting between solid and foundational to distilled and perceived rather than detected.”

SWARM INTELLIGENCE / ON THE MIX

The decision to work entirely with vinyl gives this proposition another productive contradiction. Much of the music was made through synthesis, digital signal processing, algorithmic procedures or microscopic studio editing, yet it reaches the mix through groove, pressing, cartridge and hand. Technologies designed to exceed the body are returned to a surface that can be touched, worn and misread. The needle adds no romantic guarantee of authenticity. It introduces friction. Against a contemporary assumption that precision requires invisible playback, Hayes makes precision coexist with the small instabilities of a physical carrier. The mix is not nostalgic for records. It needs their resistance.

Monolake’s “Nucleus” is the ideal first excavation. Originally released on Gravity in 2001 and cut to vinyl for the first time by Field Records in 2025, it arrives from an era when dub space, computer music and club function were being recombined with extraordinary economy. Robert Henke and Gerhard Behles built Monolake’s early language from exacting digital processes, but “Nucleus” feels less like a demonstration of software than a chamber whose dimensions are inferred from reflection. Beginning with it establishes the mix’s governing scale. The listener is not given a beat to follow so much as a volume to measure.

Karim Maas’s “Lizzard King” corrodes that clean negative space. The bass remains architectural, but its edges splinter and circuitry appears to strain against the grid. Aho Ssan and Resina’s “Egress II,” from their 2025 collaboration Ego Death, then converts the fracture into dialogue. Aho Ssan’s digitally generated masses and Resina’s cello-derived pressure refuse the old separation between electronic and acoustic source. Their collaboration, developed after an encounter around Nicolás Jaar’s Weavings project and brought into physical form at Unsound, hears the string not as organic consolation but as another body capable of abrasion. At this early point the sequence has already moved from simulated room, to faulty mechanism, to instrumental matter without breaking its depth plane.

Lakker’s “Eris Pt. 2” supplies a conceptual key. Eris Harmonia joins the Greek figures of discord and concord in one title, and the second part allows bitter harmonic colour to emerge from the atonal pressure established by the first. Hayes does not play the opposition as a neat reconciliation. He uses the record to make harmony feel conditional, a temporary pattern inside instability. Iannis Xenakis’s “Persepolis (Part 1)” enlarges that condition to monumental scale. Composed in 1971 for the ruins of Persepolis and originally diffused from eight-track tape through fifty-nine loudspeakers among light, lasers and processional fire, the work treated landscape, architecture and sound as inseparable forces. The Karlrecords edition places this historic mass on contemporary vinyl, but the piece still refuses to behave as an object. Even in stereo, it sounds like an event too large for its container.

In the records

Xenakis is not inserted as an academic credential. He is an ancestor of the mix’s physical thinking. His densities make individual causes difficult to isolate, and that uncertainty passes naturally into Cevdet Erek’s “El-Fokurtu,” created for Emin Alper’s film Frenzy. Erek deformed the sound of a helicopter until the machine suggested a bubbling, percussive organism. Source becomes rhythm through pressure rather than through illustration. Merzbow’s “Torus 2” pushes the same transformation toward saturation, while Yair Elazar Glotman’s “Oratio Continua (Part I)” reverses the direction. A trained contrabassist, Glotman built Études by interrupting learned technique and searching the instrument for resonances that virtuosity normally suppresses. Merzbow seems to erase the source through excess. Glotman reveals it by unlearning control. In Hayes’s continuum, these are complementary operations.

This passage also exposes the importance of Subtext Recordings. Aho Ssan and Resina, Erek, Glotman and, shortly afterward, FIS do not form a house style, but they share an understanding of sound as material research. Tim Hecker’s “Keyed Out,” placed between Glotman and FIS, briefly opens a luminous wound in that research. On Konoyo, recorded with members of the Tokyo Gakuso gagaku ensemble in a Japanese temple, Hecker resisted the impulse to bury every space under layers. “Keyed Out” lets a deteriorating synthesizer line and the small gravity of court instruments expose one another. Melody is present, but its presence is precarious. It is precisely the image Hayes described: tone visible behind a wall that may close again.

In the records

FIS’s “SeaPR” and Kevin Drumm’s “Impotent Hummer” make that wall porous in different ways. Oliver Peryman’s work as FIS emerged from drum and bass but increasingly replaced genre syntax with structures closer to ecology, pattern formation and environmental systems. His parallel engagement with permaculture is not a decorative biographical fact, because the music repeatedly asks how small relations produce complex wholes. Drumm, by contrast, can reduce the same question to unbearable voltage. “Impotent Hummer,” issued with Editions Mego’s edition of Sheer Hellish Miasma, belongs to the period around that 2002 landmark, where guitar, electronics and processing ceased to be separable identities. Together the two tracks show why this opening movement cannot simply be called ambient. It is a chamber under active construction, its surfaces continually grown, scraped and rebuilt.

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Glen of the Downs’ “Incident,” one of the newest records in the set, and Dot Product’s “Atmosphere Processor” begin to give that chamber a mechanism. The former arrives from Fran Hartnett’s Scart label in 2026 with a title that suggests a discrete rupture. The latter, released by Osiris Music a decade earlier, names the operation more literally. Yet Hayes avoids the obvious chronology of innovation. A piece from 2026 does not represent the present while an older record supplies heritage. Each is selected for function. “Incident” introduces a disturbance, while “Atmosphere Processor” turns atmosphere from mood into apparatus. Oneohtrix Point Never’s “Chrome Country” then produces the first unmistakable horizon, its synthetic choir and organ-like glow closing R Plus Seven with an artificial grandeur that is moving precisely because its humanity cannot be located.

ASDA’s “Lungs Full and Heavy” refuses to let that horizon become transcendence. Sebastian Gainsborough and Chester Giles bring the voice back as weight, breath and damaged social presence, their No Corner language drawing dub, noise, poetry and low-frequency pressure into the same gutter. The title is almost physiological instruction. After the disembodied sheen of “Chrome Country,” lungs reappear, but breathing is difficult. This is the threshold on which the mix begins to acquire a body.

Vit Fana’s “Fasad,” Torus’s “Omnia” and LFO’s “Blown” do not suddenly announce a dance-floor section. They allow rhythm to become incrementally more accountable. “Fasad,” from Northern Electronics’ 2016 album Irrgang, belongs to Ossian Ohlsson’s world of corroded percussion and obscured form, connected through Body Sculptures to the wider Scandinavian industrial network. Torus approaches the body from the opposite direction, using bass and spatial design with polished but unstable clarity. Then Mark Bell’s LFO places both impulses inside “Blown,” the 2003 opener to Sheath, where brittle impact and symphonic atmosphere can occupy the same compact machine. The three records define a gradient, not a switch: façade, totality, detonation.

The same tension remains active in Hayes’s own current work. Released by Omen Recordings in June 2026, Containment Field presents new material alongside remixes by Orphx and label heads AXKAN and Duellist. Its run of one hundred vinyl copies is pertinent here as a recent physical continuation of the same method the mix extends across other people’s records: brutal pressure and exact movement pressed into a surface that can wear.

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Mannerfelt & Haydo’s “Stepping In” begins the central axis of Avian and Zhark, the two label systems that give the second half its skeletal strength. Radio Mohave fractures percussion into polyrhythmic, greyscale signals. Kareem’s “Radujew,” from the 2000 release Schattenreich, answers with a much older form of industrial severity that still sounds temporally displaced. Olga+Jozef’s untitled OJ-06 cut and Sigha’s “Loop Three” continue the displacement. A Slovak record from the turn of the millennium and an Avian release from 2014 meet not because their surfaces match, but because both understand reduction as pressure. Repetition removes explanatory detail until the remaining event — strike, gap, return — feels ritualistic.

Kareem appears three times across the mix, more than any other artist, and the recurrence is decisive. “Radujew,” “Druids” and “Hinrich” stretch from 2000 through 2003 to 2018. Harsh’s “Scharal,” from the Tripods EP, belongs to the same Zhark continuum without sharing Kareem’s authorship. These are not retrospective signposts placed to certify an industrial lineage. They act as load-bearing walls. Each Kareem return makes the surrounding record sound more severe and also more spacious. Zhark’s work has long occupied the disputed territory between techno, noise, ritual and political unease, and Hayes treats that territory as a durable construction rather than a genre prehistory.

The relationship also folds back into the Secret Thirteen archive. Kareem’s STM 264 included Swarm Intelligence’s “Antenna.” Here Hayes reverses the direction and uses Kareem’s records as internal reinforcement. It is a small but telling circuit. An archive of mixes is not only a shelf of completed statements. Artists continue to hear, quote and reorganise one another across it. In this case, the quotation does not occur through sampling. It happens through placement and duration.

Antechamber’s “Lobs Pound” makes the body stagger before Kareem’s “Druids” restores a darker ceremonial gait. The Antechamber project, involving Mahk Rumbae of Konstruktivists and Codex Empire, treats industrial rhythm as a ghost architecture, with dub-like voids around objects that lurch rather than lock. “Druids” turns those voids into a site of assembly. By now Hayes has not increased intensity in the conventional sense so much as increased consequence. Earlier sounds could be perceived as weather. These sounds imply bodies forced to negotiate them.

Reeko’s “El Libro Secreto De Gala” opens the final movement with disciplined opacity. Lumisokea’s “Raid” follows by troubling the grid through analogue hardware, reel-to-reel saturation and rhythmic ideas informed by South Indian classical music. The duo’s Apophenia is aptly named: it concerns the mind’s impulse to perceive connections, and here those connections become real through mixing. Ueno Masaaki’s “Vortex State” converts them into a model of natural law. On Vortices, Ueno did not attempt to imitate natural phenomena so much as reconstruct their principles through chains of expansion and contraction. Hayes uses that rotational logic to prepare the set’s most compressed sequence. The climax begins as a change in how energy circulates, not as an abrupt rise in level.

At track twenty-eight, Harsh’s “Scharal,” from the 2001 Zhark EP Tripods, reveals that the label’s spine is wider than Kareem himself. It leads directly to “Hinrich,” allowing two decades of the same practice to touch without a historical caption. D.Å.R.F.D.H.S.’s “Bensin I Storkågeträsk” then infects that austerity with the peculiar emotional corrosion of Northern Electronics, where synth colour can resemble both memory and chemical residue.

ANFS’s “Dervisis” leaves cavities inside its broken kick pattern. Michal Jablonski’s “Wrath” and Sigha’s “04” reduce those cavities while preserving their instability, so the final acceleration never hardens into a standard run of functional techno. This is where the difficulty of Hayes’s pacing becomes clearest. With thirty-six tracks available, it would have been easy to prove range through constant interruption. Instead he makes density cumulative. Earlier electroacoustic grain remains conceptually present inside the kick, and the memory of the first hour prevents every later loop from becoming merely efficient.

The last three records deny a clean catharsis. On Huren presents MRTVI’s “Partial Deletions,” David Foster’s scorched industrial method enters the sequence as damaged information. Death Qualia’s “Kore Abduction” introduces a violent, post-industrial mutation in which rhythm feels both engineered and feral. Silk Saw’s “Same Area,” heard in the Tsantsa edit, completes the route near the exact problem from which Hayes began: rhythmic noise versus glitch, physical impact versus transformed signal, crude mass versus surgical placement. The Brussels duo’s work has long made drum-machine pulse, treated voice and abrasive electronics coexist without granting any element moral superiority. Noise is not the collapse of structure. It is one of structure’s possible truths.

What makes the two-hour ascent exceptional is therefore not seamlessness understood as the absence of friction. The mix is full of seams, but Hayes treats each seam as a place where two materials can exchange properties. Reverb lengthens those contacts. Vinyl gives them surface. Recurrent artists and labels give them memory. By the time the sequence reaches its highest pressure, the listener has not been rushed there and cannot isolate a single point at which the transformation occurred. The rhythm that seemed merely perceived at the beginning has become foundational, yet every foundation carries the instability of what preceded it.

Swarm Intelligence has constructed neither a history of industrial electronics nor a survey of personal influences. This is a genealogy of method: how an object becomes data, how data acquires grain, how grain becomes rhythm, how rhythm makes a room visible, and how a melody can survive inside the machinery without being rescued from it. Xenakis, Monolake, Subtext, Zhark, Avian, Northern Electronics and the less easily classified records between them are not flattened into agreement. Their differences are kept under sustained tension until they describe the same cavern from opposing walls.

In the end, the mix feels excavated rather than assembled. Its time span reaches from a composition made for the ruins of Persepolis in 1971 to a Scart record issued in 2026, but chronology is only another material to deform. Ancient site, power station, domestic appliance, cello body, synthetic choir, damaged groove and club kick enter the same slow pressure system. Nothing hurries, because nothing needs to announce its importance. The culmination was present as potential in the first reflected pulse. It simply took two hours for the architecture to disclose it.

Elmer Davy comes from León, a city not usually granted a central place in the heroic geography of European electronic music. That matters. His story, at least in the few public traces available, begins less with institutional validation than with the private shock of discovery. At eighteen he came into contact with electronic music through the techno produced in Detroit and Birmingham, and almost immediately followed that voltage backward into electro, EBM and eighties acid-house. In 2007 he began DJing across clubs and projects in the north of Spain. Since then, he has been associated with Quixotes Techno Dystopia, the León collective committed to the city’s more underground electronic life, where he developed as a resident DJ alongside national and international guests. The biographical line is simple, but it explains the mix completely. First the foreign signal, then the roots, then the local collective, then the patient accumulation of records until selection becomes a personal grammar.

For this journal, the first encounter with Elmer was not through a press campaign or a fashionable export narrative. I first learned his name at Ombra, in those threshold hours when the festival is still taking shape and the selector has to do something more difficult than impress. He has to open the room’s nervous system. Elmer has occupied that kind of role for Ombra more than once, and the public memory around him also includes a closing set during the second night at Lolita in November. Both positions say something about trust. Opening and closing are not decorative slots. They ask a DJ to understand the metabolism of a room before or after the obvious climax, to keep the current alive without reducing the night to spectacle.

Ombra is an important context here because it is not a neutral festival container. Born from two melancholic music lovers searching for a place to share their passion, it eventually found one of its most symbolic homes in the former Enmasa factory, the Empresa Nacional de Motores de Aviación, in Sant Adrià, Barcelona, a vast modern-rationalist industrial building constructed between 1940 and 1975 and described by the festival as one of the most industrial and gigantic architectural spaces in the city. Ombra’s stated devotion to analogue sounds, avant-garde music, and a community that rediscovers itself through art, dance and experience gives Elmer’s work a specific frame. His sets are not simply electro selections inserted into a festival lineup. They belong to an ecosystem where machine music is treated as memory, ritual, record culture and social encounter at once.

“I have dedicated this mix completely to electro, a quiet but fun set, a little dark but with funk touches.”

Elmer’s own note is modest, almost disarming. He describes the mix as completely dedicated to electro, quiet but fun, a little dark with touches of funk. Then he adds the detail that unlocks the tracklist. While preparing it, he noticed that most of the tracks came from Spanish producers, proof, in his words, that there is a lot of electro talent here. This is not national boosterism. It is closer to recognition. The mix does not ask Spain to imitate Detroit, The Hague, Miami or New York. It hears Spanish electro as a living language already in conversation with those places, a language that has learned from the old circuits without becoming trapped by reverence.

The opening is a perfect declaration of that method. Interfront’s “Strange” appears in Boris Divider’s remix, from the 2005 MSX release Ya Sabemos Quien Mato A Laura Palmer (Part II). Even before the beat settles, several histories are already touching, with Valencia’s older Megabeat and Interfront memory, the post-Twin Peaks title-world of MSX002, and Boris Divider’s precise Spanish electro futurism moving through the same groove. It is a smart place to begin because it refuses the lazy assumption that Spanish electro only belongs to the present revival. The past is already there, not as museum material but as a working voltage, remixed, reframed and made usable again.

Siarem’s “Holograma” — listed as “Hologram” on Aspecto Humano’s 2024 Cuentos Futuros compilation — continues this work of local futurism. Aspecto Humano has become one of the clearest Spanish platforms for electro, EBM, new beat and synthetic melancholy. The track carries exactly that border-zone quality, elegant but tense, melodic but not sentimental, built from the sensation that the future has already arrived and is flickering imperfectly in a dark room. Negocius Man’s “Dark Soul,” from the 2023 Microm Records release Illegal Lockdown, pushes the atmosphere closer to force and rebellion. The original release frames itself around machines, limitation, dark times and a refusal to let geography or resources determine the size of the music. In Elmer’s sequence, that spirit becomes less slogan than pulse. The record sounds like someone making electro not to reproduce a code, but to survive a pressure.

In the records

MAS 2008’s “Machine Soul” opens the mix outward into a different European register. The track appears as “Machinesoul” on the 2007 Electronic Corporation 12-inch Un-destroyable Structures, a German release whose title alone fits Elmer’s architecture, where machines are not cold objects, but structures capable of emotional durability. Axiomatize’s “I Am Evil,” released by Electrix Records in 2025, brings a sharper UK edge into the frame. The title could easily collapse into cartoon darkness, but here it functions as a tonal pivot, tightening the mix and preparing the arrival of Imatran Voima’s “Techno Slut” on Monotone. That 2006 Finnish cut is one of the set’s most delicious pressure points, dirty and comic and obscene in the old electro sense, where pleasure is inseparable from circuitry. It reminds the listener that machine funk should not be too well behaved. It needs sweat, nonsense, exaggeration, and the slightly ridiculous confidence of bodies moving to sounds that pretend not to have bodies at all.

The central section belongs to Boris Divider and the contemporary Spanish electro infrastructure around him. “Content Location,” from Gladio Operations’ 2025 In Fragments EP, is followed by Protocolo Sysex’s “Notthefuture” from the label’s Beats On Wax EP, and then by Boris Divider’s “In My Eyes” on Drivecom. The sequence feels like a small essay on continuity. Gladio Operations, Drivecom, Boris Divider and Protocolo Sysex are not isolated names, but parts of a circuit that has kept Spanish electro literate, physical and forward-facing. “Content Location” sounds almost self-descriptive in this context. Elmer is locating content, yes, but also locating a culture, showing where it is pressed, who keeps mastering it, which labels give it shape, and how its language moves from Madrid and Barcelona outward into the crates of selectors who know how to make it speak.

What is striking is how little Elmer needs to dramatize this middle passage. He does not present Spanish electro as a peak or a manifesto. He simply lets it occupy the center with authority. Half Mute’s “Attractor,” a still-obscure entry from D91 Link Series 01, becomes almost a hinge between the more documented label histories and the smaller local channels that are harder to catalogue from outside. Univac’s “Alamogordo,” which appears as “Alamogordo Test” on the 2022 Mindri release Helicon, then shifts the energy into heavier electro-EBM terrain, austere and propulsive without becoming blunt. UHF’s “Hanging Baskets,” from the 2024 HC Records album Those Dark Whims, adds acid-damaged tension and a sense of mischievous darkness. Univac returns with “Collider” from M.U.S.A.’s 2020 Raval Rave Breakers Pts 2, a Barcelona white-label document whose very format — stamped, limited, physical — seems to echo Elmer’s own vinyl-centred practice.

This is where the mix becomes most convincing as a portrait. Anyone can build an electro set by moving between classics and contemporary bombs. Elmer instead gathers a Spanish field of activity that feels granular, moving through Aspecto Humano, Microm, Gladio Operations, Drivecom, D91, Mindri through Univac, HC Records, M.U.S.A. and Oráculo. The labels do not all sound the same, and that is the point. They show electro as a many-roomed structure, darkwave-adjacent, acid-stained, EBM-compatible, broken, synthetic, sometimes elegant, sometimes rude. Uncanny Unit’s “El Futuro Está En Vuestras Manos,” from Dark Vektor’s 2025 Oráculo compilation El Elektro Compilado Padrísimo Vol. 1, makes the idea explicit. The future is in your hands. In a lesser set the phrase would feel too direct. Here it arrives after enough evidence to sound earned.

Only after this Spanish body has been established does Elmer turn toward the older transatlantic foundations. Detroit In Effect’s “Out With Tha Old,” heard here through Clone West Coast Series’ 2018 remastered reissue of The Men You’ll Never See Pt.2, is not placed as a museum tag. It lands as living Detroit pressure, raw and direct, with the kind of bassline economy that makes most later electro seem overdesigned. D.I.E. does not need to explain itself. It simply enters the mix and the room becomes older, tougher, more rooted in Black electronic invention and more historically charged. The title, “Out With Tha Old,” is funny in this position because the track proves the opposite. The old is not out. It is still the measure by which the present either tightens or collapses.

Newcleus’ “Computer Age (Push The Button)” closes the sequence by returning electro to one of its most foundational pop imaginations. Originally from 1984 and represented in the supplied tracklist by the Jam-On Recordings reissue catalogue, it carries a different kind of origin energy than D.I.E. Where Detroit In Effect gives the mix lean street pressure, Newcleus gives it colour, playfulness, science-fiction innocence and the pre-internet fantasy of the computer as button, voice, joke, machine and dance partner. It would be easy to treat this ending as nostalgia, but Elmer’s preceding hour prevents that. After all the Spanish records, after the dark edges and contemporary label work, Newcleus sounds less like a throwback than a reminder of electro’s most durable paradox. It was futuristic because it was fun, and it stayed serious because the fun was technically, culturally and bodily precise.

The pleasure of this mix lies in that balance. It is dark but never heavy-handed, funky but never decorative, quiet in its pacing but not passive. Elmer does not over-explain himself through transitions. He lets the tracks create a social space around one another. The breaks and acid traces that define his broader DJ language are present, but they are restrained by the discipline of the theme. Raw techno and EBM hover at the edge without taking control. Electro remains the grammar, yet the grammar is elastic enough to hold regional history, festival memory, record-collector intimacy and dance-floor intelligence.

In the context of Secret Thirteen, this matters. The archive has always valued mixes that behave as personal cartographies rather than genre demonstrations. Elmer Davy’s mix is exactly that, not a definitive history of electro, not a national survey, not a club promo, but a human route through machines. It begins in Spanish memory, gathers the present around it, then lets Detroit and New York re-enter as living ancestors. It also quietly documents something that is often missed from outside Spain. The country’s electro underground is not peripheral. It has its own labels, collectors, technicians, residents, festival rooms and stubborn believers. It has people like Elmer, who can open a room at Ombra, close a night at Lolita, return to a local collective in León, and still make a mix that speaks outward without losing its accent.

The final impression is not of a specialist proving his knowledge, but of a listener sharing the records that have taught him how machines can smile in the dark. The computer age is still here. The future is still in our hands. Somewhere between León and Sant Adrià, a needle drops, a bassline bends, and electro remembers that it was always both body and idea.

NX1 — the Barcelona-based project of Surit and Samot — has always carried a double identity. It is a duo, a live act, a production language, and also the first sub-label through which Nexe Records began to articulate its own doctrine. Nexe means nexus, a link with music, the scene, techno’s origins, and the visual and graphic structures that surround the record as a physical object. That word matters here because this mix is not built as a display of possession. It behaves like a junction. Each record is allowed to touch the next without being forced into submission; each transition feels like a thought continuing under different pressure rather than a beat being professionally locked into place.

That double identity comes from years of friendship rather than convenience. Surit and Samot have known each other since childhood. They grew up around electronic music and built NX1 from a shared instinct that still feels unusually compact. Their work can move from stripped, hard and purist techno into noisier, broken and industrial shapes, but the internal message remains recognisable. On their first full-length album, What You Should Know About Yourself, that evolution became more explicit. The record opens a personal and introspective zone before returning to heavier dance-floor pressure, which is why this mix feels so revealing. It does not explain NX1 from the outside. It lets us hear the records, methods and emotional temperatures that keep feeding the project from beneath.

“The focus is on continuity through feeling rather than tempo, embracing imperfections as part of the flow.”

That sentence, sent by NX1 with the tracklist, is the key to the whole hour. There is no traditional beatmatching involved, and this absence should not be mistaken for looseness. It is, in fact, the most disciplined decision in the recording. The duo choose not to flatten these records into a single club mechanism. They place one record after another, let it breathe on its own terms, overlap only when the overlap has emotional necessity, and preserve the small irregularities that make the sequence human. For artists whose name is often attached to raw, mental and heavy techno, the refusal of obvious techno continuity becomes the most precise form of self-portraiture.

The opening is almost microscopic. Drexciya’s “Quantum Hydrodynamics,” from the Hydro Doorways 12-inch on Tresor Berlin, does not arrive as an anthem but as a pressure reading. It is short, unstable and condensed — less a track than a signal from inside the apparatus. Drexciya’s mythology has been written about so often that it risks becoming a fixed historical badge, but NX1 avoid that trap by using the piece as texture rather than citation. The aquatic imagination is present, of course, but what matters more is the sense of sound behaving as matter under force. A record begins; a system opens; the tanks are not full yet.

/beyond/ follows with “Resurrection,” and the geographical field shifts without leaving the same darkness. Released through Urban Legend in 2016, it brings the mix closer to a Spanish underground logic, where techno becomes horror architecture, synthesis turns into interior threat, and rhythm stays half-buried rather than fully declared. The title is almost too perfect. After Drexciya’s compressed opening, “Resurrection” does not raise the dead theatrically; it lets the room become inhabited. This is one of the first places where the mix reveals its deeper concern. It is not genre movement, but the strange emotional persistence of certain sonic languages. The dead do not return as nostalgia. They return as method.

The Exaltics’ “Quiet Earth” extends the electro line into a different kind of silence. Robert Witschakowski’s project has often operated in the shadowed zone between machine funk, science-fiction melancholy and moody electro architecture, and “Quiet Earth” gives NX1 a way to keep the Drexciyan current alive without simply repeating it. Its title suggests an emptied planet, but the track itself is not vacant. It is populated by small movements and careful melodic traces, with a sadness that refuses spectacle. In the context of the mix, it becomes a bridge from mythology to atmosphere — from the submerged future to the ground after the signal has faded.

Trentemøller’s “Glow” is the first surprise if one approaches NX1 only through the club. It softens the surface, opens a warmer and more cinematic register, and allows the mix to inhale. Taken from Memoria, it places indie-electronic dream architecture inside an otherwise harder lineage, but the move never feels decorative. “Glow” functions exactly as its title promises, as a low light spreading over metallic forms. It reminds us that influence is not always about stylistic ancestry. Sometimes it is about atmosphere, about the way a melody holds itself at a distance, about a production space where fragility is not weakness but tension.

Then Magthea enters, and the recording begins to fray. “Magthea and Insanity (Extract),” reintroduced through Contort Yourself’s archival excavation of 1980s underground cassette culture, drags the hour into another kind of material history. This is not music trying to be clean. It carries the grain of tape, the instability of private rooms, and the claustrophobic confidence of artists who did not need a market to authorize their experiments. Voice, drum machine, minimal synth pressure and damaged theatricality make the track sound less like a recovered document than a live infection from the cassette era. NX1’s placement of it after Trentemøller is ruthless and beautiful. The glow does not disappear. It curdles.

Ora Iso’s “Dead Riot” brings the mix into a more explicitly industrial body. Released on Downwards, it is haunted by the kind of urban pressure that feels less composed than endured. The track does not simply sound dark; it sounds trapped, as if movement itself has become a political and psychological condition. NX1 do not use it to create a dramatic peak. They let it sit, bruised and unresolved, until their own “Seed Core” appears almost as a hidden organ inside the sequence. The self-inclusion is modest but exact. From What You Should Know About Yourself, “Seed Core” belongs to the more mental, low-BPM and introspective side of NX1’s recent work. In this position it is not promotion. It is disclosure. After the industrial exterior of Ora Iso, NX1 reveal the internal seed — the core from which their current sound can still grow without needing to accelerate.

In the records

“Anymore” by Mick Harris is the only piece in the selection not drawn from vinyl, and the exception feels narratively essential. Played from CD, it interrupts the physical continuity of the record crate without breaking the emotional continuity of the hour. For Secret Thirteen, Harris’s name also carries a private echo, since his earlier STM 233 transmission remains one of the archive’s most abstract and uncompromising statements. His work has long understood low frequency as architecture, dub as pressure, and repetition as a form of mental weather. Here the mix begins to lose the outline of techno almost completely. Bass becomes residue; rhythm becomes trace; the room becomes heavier without becoming louder. It is one of the most important placements in the set because it proves that dissolution does not mean emptiness. It means the structure is still present, only no longer visible from the front.

“Rinse Out All Contaminants,” credited to Shackleton with Ernesto Tomasini, turns that dissolution into ritual. The title reads like instruction, purification, violence and care at once. Shackleton’s music has always had a ceremonial relationship with repetition, but the presence of Tomasini’s voice changes the scale of the space. Suddenly the human element is not a sample, not decoration, not a hook, but an unstable spiritual force moving through the electronics. NX1 allow this piece to stretch the mix outward. It is long enough to alter the listener’s breathing. It does not cleanse by removing darkness. It cleanses by making the darkness articulate.

Doxa Sinistra’s “The Other Stranger” answers that ritual with archival estrangement. The Dutch project’s early-1980s industrial and sound-collage world belongs to the same underground nerve system as Magthea, but its effect here is different. Where Magthea feels like a tape-room fever, Doxa Sinistra feels like a stranger entering a surveillance image. The minimal pulse, the sample fragments and the cold synthetic insistence tighten the hour after Shackleton’s expansion. They also clarify one of the mix’s central ideas. The past does not appear here as comfort. It appears as something still unresolved, still active, still capable of altering the present tense.

The Drift Institute’s “I Used To Be A Stoner” brings the thread forward again. The project of NVST and Théo Muller, released through the Barcelona label Pensaments Sònics, joins dark ambient, drone, industrial, dub and trip-hop into a contemporary political and occult atmosphere. In the hands of NX1, the track becomes a late-hour hallucination where social dread, bodily fatigue and slow rhythm meet. Its placement after Doxa Sinistra is crucial. The cassette underground, the industrial fragment and the voice from the margins are not sealed in the 1980s. They mutate into new configurations of anger, exhaustion and cinematic unease.

Drexciya return with “Draining Of The Tanks,” and the title now lands with almost cruel precision. What began with “Quantum Hydrodynamics” as compressed aquatic force comes back as emptying, as depletion, as the system releasing what it had been holding. The return is not symmetrical. NX1 do not circle back to the source in order to reassure us. They return to show that the source has changed because the listener has changed. After Ora Iso, Harris, Shackleton, Doxa Sinistra and The Drift Institute, Drexciya sounds less like origin mythology and more like the pressure chamber beneath everything. The tanks are draining, but the resonance remains.

/beyond/’s “Phase IV” then acts as a final local shadow before the last descent. It is less a track title than a structural marker, a reminder that the mix has been moving through stages rather than tempos. By this point the hour has already passed through resurrection, quiet earth, glow, riot, seed, contamination, stranger and drainage, so “Phase IV” holds the accumulated grammar open for one more moment, suspended between Spanish dark-wave techno and the wider industrial-electro memory that has fed NX1’s own practice from the beginning.

Coil’s “Dark River” is the only possible ending once it arrives. Originally released in 1991 on Love’s Secret Domain, it still sounds strangely ahead of the vocabulary that later electronic music would use to describe itself. It is not IDM, not techno, not industrial in any narrow sense, not ambient in the passive sense. It is a hallucinogenic current, a synthetic river moving through occult pop, post-industrial experimentation and nocturnal electronic form. Heard here, after Drexciya’s tanks and /beyond/’s final phase, “Dark River” feels criminally under-discussed — a piece that seems to pre-echo later British abstraction while remaining more feverish, bodily and dangerous than most of what followed. NX1 let it close the hour not as a grand statement, but as a disappearance into depth.

What makes this mix so absorbing is the trust it places in slowness. Nothing is forced to prove itself quickly. There are no heroic blends, no impatient genre pivots, no need to demonstrate DJ craft through obvious technical continuity. The craft sits in restraint, in the decision to let one record keep its own temperature before another enters, in the courage to leave gaps where other selectors would chase momentum, and in the understanding that silence, memory and surface noise can carry as much narrative weight as rhythm.

NX1’s own techno has often sounded like pressure being organized into form. This mix shows what happens before and after that organization. It reveals a library of tensions where aquatic myth meets cassette decay, and where industrial dread, dub gravity, gothic electronics, political hallucination and private beauty start contaminating one another. The result is not a map of influences in the academic sense, but a listening ritual built from records that have been lived with over time. It is the sound of structure learning how to dissolve without leaving the room.

The nexus remains open. The river keeps moving.

Secret Thirteen Mix 315 does not arrive as a statement of aesthetic position or a survey of current tastes. It arrives, Karlsson explains, from a pile of Swedish vinyl spread across a floor — records pulled, listened to, and arranged according to a logic that he himself characterizes as “perhaps a pretty dysfunctional way.” The mix was recorded from these physical records, processed through hardware: drum machines, samplers, synthesizers, effects units and filters running in parallel with the turntable output. This matters. It means the mix is not simply a sequence of curated documents but a live transformation of them — each record arriving already processed through Karlsson’s own sonic metabolism, his present-day machine aesthetic touching the past rather than merely archiving it. The result is a tracklist whose temporal range is staggering — stretching from 1980 to an unreleased 2026 track by Karlsson himself — yet whose texture feels unified, pressed together by the specific gravity of one person’s history with this music. He was there. These records shaped him. He has returned to them not for nostalgia’s sake but because they still work, because their energy has not dissipated, because the DIY, disjointed, punky side of Swedish electronic music that they represent is, as Karlsson puts it plainly, the music of his youth.

Sweden occupies a peculiar position in the map of electronic music history. Its mainstream productions — those polished, melody-saturated constructions whose most famous expression is ABBA’s architectural precision and the MPS of Swedish house that would later colonize the globe — are so thoroughly recognized as to have become almost invisible. But running parallel and underground to that tradition is another current, barely documented in English-language music writing, only recently beginning to surface in the awareness of collectors and archivists: a network of cassette labels, DIY recordings, experimental compilations, and small-run vinyl releases that operated across Swedish cities from the late 1970s through the 1990s with the same ethos of self-sufficiency and formal ungainliness that distinguished the British and German industrial tape underground of the same period. Anders Karlsson grew up inside this other tradition. Secret Thirteen Mix 315 is his map of it.

The central institutional backbone of that world — at least as it is represented in this tracklist — is the cluster of labels whose output coheres around Börft Records, the venerable Karlskrona operation that started as a cassette label in 1987 and released its first vinyl in 1989; its sub-label UFO Mongo, founded around the year 2000 specifically to channel the experimental industrial work accumulating in Börft’s orbit; and Konduktör Rekords, founded 1982–83 by Lars Larsson, the frontman of En Halvkokt I Folie and arguably the most important single figure in this entire ecosystem. Taken together, these labels represent one of the longest-running and most consistently idiosyncratic operations in European underground electronic music, their combined catalogue stretching from primitive cassette noise through lo-fi synth-punk, industrial, electro, acid and techno without ever losing what Börft itself has described as an instinct for “off-centre, experimental music from the Nordics.” Konduktör Rekords is present here with the density of an anchor. Two consecutive tracks — Fågeldöd’s “Guldsteklarna som cirkulerar ovanför” (“The golden wasps that circulate above”) and Mygel’s “Terapi” — both originate from the same 1985 Konduktör vinyl compilation, “Modern Pop Music According To De Selby,” while the sequence flows immediately into En Halvkokt I Folie’s “Statsanslag Till Jägarnas Riksförbund, M.M.” (“State grants to the Hunters’ National Association, etc.”), drawn from a later Konduktör release. To inhabit these records consecutively is to experience the entire aesthetic coordinates of a label and a moment — the absurdist bureaucratic title alone a perfect encapsulation of Larsson’s project: recognizing the surreal potential in the dullest surfaces of Swedish administrative life.

“Swedes are good at making two kinds of music, very catchy, well-produced, mainstream music, or totally fucked up, strangely produced, ‘weird stuff’. I’m a fan of both.”

The mix opens not with historical distance but with a pointed contemporary act of context-setting. Född Död’s “De Ensammas Hus” — the project of Jonas Rönnberg and Sofia Al Rammal Sturdza, released on Northern Electronics in 2015 — arrives first, establishing an immediate sonic kinship with what follows. Rönnberg, who also records as Varg and co-runs the Northern Electronics label with Abdulla Rashim, carries in his practice the residue of earlier involvement in black metal, reprocessed now into something darker, more diffuse, more cinematically abstracted. Rönnberg and Karlsson are not strangers to each other’s company: as Vargdöd, they released a full collaboration on Opal Tapes in 2017, its six tracks exercising what the label described as a shared “keen instinct for expansive, gloomy atmospherics and techno subtleties.” The choice to open with this 2015 track — its title meaning “The House of the Lonely” — is a precise statement of intent. This is a mix about working material, not completed objects. It is about the state of things when they are still permeable, still carrying the heat of their making. That Karlsson would place it against the backdrop of a Karlskrona cassette from 1985 suggests that the line between the contemporary Swedish underground and the historical one is less a generational gap than a continuous thread, slightly obscured but never broken.

The plunge into Konduktör Rekords that follows confirms what the opening track proposed: that En Halvkokt I Folie’s Lars Larsson occupies a position in the Swedish experimental underground not entirely unlike that of Throbbing Gristle in the British one — the figure who made the infrastructure by making the music, whose catalogue moves from noise to synth comedy to industrial abstraction with an unpredictability that made categorization futile and eventually irrelevant. Larsson founded the label precisely because no existing structure would accommodate what he and his peers were making. His DIY logic — distribute through classified ads, press in tiny runs, treat the cassette as the natural unit of exchange — prefigured and in some ways enabled the culture Anders Karlsson grew up within.

If the mix’s opening passages belong to Börft’s southern Swedish underground, the middle section pivots to a different but equally important strand of the story. Ståålfågel — “Steel Bird,” the duo of Erik Fritjofsson and Petter Brundell, released through the independent Musiklaget Slick imprint — issued their self-titled debut in 1980, making them among the earliest Swedish artists to fuse drum machines and synthesizers with the post-punk energy that was simultaneously reshaping guitar-based music. Their “En Dag I Varuhuset” — “A Day in the Department Store” — captures something specific about that moment when synthetic sound was still disorienting in the context of everyday Swedish life, when the drum machine’s inhuman precision landed not as comfort but as provocation. Musiklaget Slick, whose small roster contains some of the most distinctive Swedish new wave recordings of the period, represents the commercial-adjacent but resolutely independent dimension of this world — bands pressing their own vinyl, defining their own distribution, refusing to wait for any institution to validate them.

The inclusion of Twice A Man’s “Decay” from their debut album Music for Girls (Silence Records, 1982) deepens this context considerably. Formed in 1978 as Cosmic Overdose — described in retrospective accounts as the first electronic band in Scandinavia — the Gothenburg duo of Dan Söderqvist and Karl Gasleben renamed themselves in 1981 at the instigation of a British promoter, their first London performance taking place on the 14th of December that year. By the time they recorded Music for Girls, they had developed a sound that combined the icy futurist sweep of Ultravox and the melancholic synthetic textures of Gary Numan with something warmer, more specifically Scandinavian — Söderqvist’s worldview oriented around environmental concern and a melancholy romanticism that would become more refined across their decades-long career. “Decay” is the track on that album that wears its era most transparently, its mid-tempo synthetic pulse and the characteristic grain of Söderqvist’s voice creating the sonic equivalent of a photograph developing in real time: familiar forms emerging gradually from chemical darkness. The fact that Twice A Man would go on to compose for the Royal Dramatic Theatre in Stockholm and eventually for the PlayStation video game Kula World — all while maintaining an entirely independent artistic trajectory — speaks to the Swedish capacity for accommodation between the experimental and the institutional that Karlsson’s mix circles without ever resolving.

The mix’s most carefully placed act of self-inscription arrives at track seven, where Skuggministeriet’s “Addicted (to acid)” — listed as Unreleased, 2026 — disrupts the historical documentary with something from Karlsson’s own present. Skuggministeriet is Karlsson’s alter ego, an alias he first deployed publicly in 2021 with the Caged EP on Femur Records, revealing — as the label described it — “a sweeter and more melodious side,” swinging between “the roughness and urgency of 80’s lo-fi electro and the freshness and emotivity of the pioneers of the beginning of the 80’s.” The insertion of an unreleased 2026 track here is not merely a DJ’s prerogative to share new material; it is an act of temporal implication — a statement that the DIY spirit being traced through these historical records is still living, that the cassette culture whose logic suffuses the mix has not become a museum piece but a working practice. The title’s bilingual ambiguity — “acid” naming both a substance and a musical genre — situates Skuggministeriet precisely at the intersection this mix keeps returning to: between private history and shared genre syntax, between Swedish and English, between the chemical and the synthetic.

Track ten — Celldöd feat. Beta Evers, “Everything” on 4mg Records (2025) — extends this self-inscription to Karlsson’s primary alias and to one of his most enduring creative relationships. Beta Evers, the German minimal synth and EBM artist Brigitte Langkabel, has orbited Karlsson’s world for years: her own contribution to these pages, Secret Thirteen Mix 236, traced a parallel lineage through Belgian and German industrial electronics, and she appeared in Karlsson’s Secret Thirteen Mix 259 as one of its defining moments of goth dancefloor intensity. The 2025 collaboration “Everything” represents the explicit materialization of a long-implicit kinship — two producers whose roots run through the same European post-punk underground finally committing to the same space. Beta Evers started her first band as a teenager in the 1980s, within the same new wave and punk experimental framework that formed Karlsson; her trajectory through EBM, electro, and experimental club music runs roughly parallel to his, albeit rooted in German rather than Swedish soil. The track sits at the mix’s center as both a product of its time and a convergence of two timelines that had been building toward each other for decades.

In the records

The geography of Swedish underground music in the 1980s was never exclusively a Scandinavian story. Enhänta Bödlar — “One-Handed Executioners,” the industrial project founded in Ljungby in 1982 by Valiant Dunkeldäld (alias Uddah-Buddah), with Roger Karmanik as its most significant collaborator — distributed cassettes through classified advertisements in Swedish music magazines and achieved international reach via precisely the kind of cross-continental tape-trading network that preceded the internet’s archival function. Their track “Akaphi Ad Ultimum” appears here from Auxilio De Cientos, a Spanish label that in the mid-1980s released some of the most compelling minimal synth and experimental electronic music in Europe, its roster drawing together Belgian, French, and Swedish industrial projects in a configuration that existed entirely outside conventional music industry geography. That Enhänta Bödlar — one of Sweden’s first pure industrial music acts, whose aesthetic universe drew explicitly from Throbbing Gristle, Psychic TV, and Whitehouse — would end up on a Barcelona label is a reminder that underground music in the pre-digital era had a genuinely international nervous system, maintained by tape culture, correspondence, and the shared commitment to release outside commercial structures. Roger Karmanik, the other formal member of Enhänta Bödlar, would later found both Brighter Death Now — one of the most uncompromising Swedish power electronics projects — and Cold Meat Industry, the Stockholm label that became the most important Swedish imprint for dark ambient and industrial music in the 1990s. The trajectory is legible in retrospect; Enhänta Bödlar was the training ground.

Against all of this, the appearance of Ratata’s “Romantic (Non Mi Ami Piu)” from 1981 is the mix’s most deliberately dissonant, most precisely calibrated, most affectionate gesture. Ratata — formed in Stockholm in 1980 by vocalist and keyboardist Mauro Scocco alongside Heinz Liljedahl, Anders Skog, and Johan Kling — signed their first record deal with Stranded Rekords in 1981, a label whose releases include some of the most distinctive early Swedish new wave and minimal synth recordings. “Romantic (Non Mi Ami Piu)” appeared as the B-side of their debut single “För varje dag,” released September 1981. This was three years before Ratata’s commercial transformation into one of the best-selling Swedish pop acts of the decade — chart hits, arena concerts, and eventually a duet alongside Anni-Frid Lyngstad of ABBA. Scocco himself would go on to become a major solo artist and one of Sweden’s most celebrated songwriters. None of that future is present in the B-side of this 1981 single.

What is present is a group that has not yet resolved the tension between its experimental impulse and its melodic instinct — a tension held in suspension by the imperfect production values and the peculiar choice to embed an Italian phrase in a Swedish pop release. “Non mi ami più” — “You don’t love me anymore” — arrives as a kind of private message from Italian popular song culture, untranslated and unexcluded, occupying the B-side of a Swedish new wave single as naturally as a foreign language phrase carries when heard in a crowded pre-party apartment. The inclusion of this track is the moment where Karlsson’s mix fully articulates the paradox at its heart. The Ratata B-side is not the mainstream and not the fucked up; it is the exact instant before the choice is made, the moment of pure potentiality when both directions are still open. Karlsson has found this record — obscure even within Ratata’s own discography — and placed it in the company of Swedish industrial cassette noise and UFO Mongo experimental electronics not to mock it or to exoticize it, but because it belongs there. Because the pre-party culture he describes, those evenings listening to strange cassettes and VHS tapes before the main event, held room for all of it simultaneously.

Salaligan’s “Samen” on Castor Records (1983) closes the mix. The title, shared with the Dutch and Afrikaans word for “together,” may be coincidence or may be another of those cross-lingual implantations that recur throughout this tracklist — the Swedish underground in dialogue with the wider European underground, not through any formal network but through the accidents and deliberate borrowings of people who were receiving signals from multiple directions and routing them through their own equipment. The word carries a resonance appropriate to the conclusion: something communal, collective, arrived at by proximity and shared attention rather than by design.

There is a distinction worth dwelling on between Anders Karlsson as documentarian and Anders Karlsson as protagonist. This mix is not a survey of Swedish electronic music history delivered from a position of critical detachment. It is a map drawn by someone who was in the rooms, who owned these records when they were new or nearly new, who heard Ståålfågel’s synthesizers as contemporary rather than historical, who circulated in the world that Konduktör Rekords served before that world became archival curiosity. The hardware processing through which each record passes — drum machines, synths, filters and effects units coloring the signal — is not a gesture of sonic improvement but a form of dialogue: Karlsson’s present-day machines in conversation with the past-tense vinyl pressing against the needle. The physical medium is the content; the crackle and surface noise not incidental but integral, evidence of the objects having been handled, played, loved.

It is worth noting, finally, what this mix represents within the archive of this journal. Celldöd first appeared in these pages with Secret Thirteen Mix 259, and Beta Evers with Secret Thirteen Mix 236 — both contributions arriving from the same northern European underground network that this new mix maps with such precision. The appearance of Varg, whose Northern Electronics label has operated at the intersection of Swedish electronic music’s contemporary and historical dimensions, adds another thread. These are not coincidences of curation; they are convergences of commitment, the same bodies of music drawing the same listeners toward them across different years and different contexts. Karlsson has assembled a tracklist that reads not just as personal history but as testimony: that the DIY, unglamorous, locally produced and internationally distributed underground of Swedish electronic music since 1980 is not a niche within a niche but a coherent tradition — one that carried its energy forward through the cassette era, through the vinyl era, through the early internet era, and into the present tense, where Karlsson himself is still making records, still running his own label, still releasing music under multiple aliases, still processing hardware in real time and offering the results to anyone who will listen.

The pre-party is not over. The strange cassette is still playing.

Secret Thirteen Mix 314, recorded on three turntables from an entirely vinyl collection, is the sonic architecture of that philosophy. It is TRSSX’s attempt to compress into eighty-six minutes what EXIT offers in physical space — a reality constructed from “real people, making real music, hanging out in real spaces.” The tracklist reads not like a DJ chart but like a carefully considered bibliography of the club’s sonic identity: many of the records featured were purchased directly from artists who have performed at EXIT, or from those Szatko hopes to invite in the future. Each one carries the residue of a handshake, a conversation at the merch table, a shared moment in the fog-thick darkness of the dancefloor. In this sense, the mix is less a performance than a cartography of relationships — an invisible map drawn in low frequencies and etched into vinyl grooves.

The temporal span of the tracklist alone is telling. It stretches across more than four decades — from Cindytalk’s “The Ghost Never Smiles,” originally released on their seminal 1984 debut Camouflage Heart and recently reissued on vinyl by Dais Records, to the same project’s “I See Her In Everything,” appearing on the 2026 Helen Scarsdale Agency double LP Sunset and Forever. That Cindytalk — the mercurial expressionist outlet of the Scottish artist Cinder, whose work has undergone a continuous process of disintegration and regeneration since the early 1980s — bookends this mix is no coincidence. It suggests a certain understanding of lineage: that the tormented post-punk deconstructions of four decades ago and the granular, swooning dark ambient of today share not just a voice but a wound. And between those two poles, everything trembles.

The mix opens in a state of suspension. There are no rhythms, no orientation. What unfolds in the first quarter of an hour is a dronal cathedral — vibrating, taut, suffused with a kind of ecclesiastical dread. “I See Her In Everything” — the closing piece from Cindytalk’s newest album Sunset and Forever, a work written and recorded across Japan, London and Scotland “sometime in the past and in the present” — enters like breath dissolving into cold stone, followed by Kareem’s “The Garden Of Time” from Zhark — a label whose aesthetic universe TRSSX inhabits intimately, having released his own debut EP The Degree of Difference Between Them on the imprint in April 2025. This opening passage is not ambient in the passive, decorative sense. It is ambient as surgical preparation — the slow, meticulous numbing before an incision. The textures are wide and viscous, expanding with the unhurried patience of veins distending under pressure. There is a strange metallic respiration within the sound — an industrial exhalation trapped inside something organic, as if the recordings were made in the thoracic cavity of a machine that has learned to breathe.

Scott Gordon’s III on Diagonal Records and VÍZ’s Eden X on Heat Crimes contribute to this liminal topography, while Venera’s “Decreation” — released on Bill Kouligas’s PAN — adds an almost theological weight, its title evoking Simone Weil’s concept of self-annihilation as a path toward divine attention. The opening section of this mix might be understood through precisely that framework: decreation as method, the emptying-out that must precede any meaningful encounter. The listener is asked to shed, to become permeable, before the body is addressed.

“Low-end is way more difficult to understand, in its relationship to space and rhythm, than it would seem. The sheer length of low-end waves really means there is so much to understand there spatially.”

Around the sixteenth minute, something fundamental shifts. Rhythm enters — not as announcement but as a barely perceptible geological event, the way tectonic plates grind imperceptibly for millennia before producing visible consequence. The rhythmic elements are slow, alien, suggestive of some futuristic communal ritual: percussive figures that recall drums but refuse their conventions, deeply synthetic yet somehow analog in their imperfections. Ancestral Voices’ “Vine Of The Soul” in its Pact Infernal remix on Samurai Horo inaugurates a realm where the Samurai Music and Horo ecosystem — that Berlin-based lattice of dark polyrhythmic experimentation connecting producers like Sam KDC, ASC, Pact Infernal, and Sciama — provides the harmonic bedrock for the mix’s central evolution. These labels emerged from the outermost edges of drum and bass culture to pioneer a genuinely genreless approach to tempo and weight, and they share with EXIT an allergy to categorization and a devotion to depth. It is worth noting that this journal published a mix by the Samurai/Horo label boss Presha himself — Secret Thirteen Mix 079 — over a decade ago, an early recognition of the ecosystem’s significance that this tracklist now thoroughly confirms.

What follows is a gradual, almost imperceptible acceleration — one of the mix’s most remarkable achievements. The listener is drawn downward and forward simultaneously, like sediment caught in a deepening current. By the twenty-seventh minute, the tempo has climbed to nearly 170 BPM, yet this is not drum and bass in any conventional reading. The beats are fractured, lagging, operating in the halftime shadows where rhythm becomes more felt than counted. Sam KDC’s “Pyramid” — from his Feardom EP on Horo, a record described on release as “techno skewed and stretched so that its original form hangs in jagged chunks off the edges of the rhythm” — exemplifies this approach. The polyrhythmic work that Sam KDC and ASC pioneered for the Horo and Grey Area labels finds its most potent application here: rhythms that do not conform to the grid of 4/4 but instead strike irregularly, impulsively, like blows delivered to the solar plexus from unpredictable angles.

This is music that demands corporeal engagement. The sub-bass frequencies operating throughout these middle passages are not ornamental — they are architectural, structural, load-bearing. Their wavelengths are so long that they occupy physical space in ways higher frequencies cannot: the subwoofer does not merely produce sound, it displaces air, pulling the listener’s body forward and back in a tidal motion best felt in the abdomen. This is the depth TRSSX speaks of when he discusses his relationship to low-end frequencies — a depth he admits to perpetually reworking, perpetually trying to understand more fully. “Low-end is way more difficult to understand, in its relationship to space and rhythm, than it would seem,” he reflects. “The sheer length of low-end waves really means there is so much to understand there spatially.” It is a statement that could serve as a production philosophy, but coming from someone who also admits to dealing with “serious derealisation every day,” it acquires a different resonance. For TRSSX, deep sound is not an aesthetic preference — it is a therapeutic strategy, a means of embedding oneself in a physical reality that might otherwise feel unreachable.

The central body of the mix navigates a labyrinthine passage through industrial territories that refuse easy periodization. Unknown Path’s “Path 0.1” on Auxiliary — ASC’s foundational label, a parallel axis to Horo — meshes with the corroded textures of Sciama’s “Indignation” and the paranoid architectures of JK Flesh’s “Paranoid Archetype” on Pressure. The appearance of JK Flesh — Justin K. Broadrick’s solo project channeling heavyweight techno and noise — is doubly significant given that Broadrick also constitutes one half of Zonal alongside Kevin Martin (The Bug), whose “In A Cage” featuring Moor Mother appears later in the tracklist. This is not merely a coincidence of two records by connected artists; it is a demonstration of how tightly the web of influence is woven. Zonal’s Wrecked — that monumental 2019 collaboration where Broadrick and Martin’s cavernous bass, cacophonous dub, and ear-splitting drone met Moor Mother’s afro-futurist poetics of incarceration and rage — finds its natural context within this mix. Moor Mother’s declarations on “In A Cage” — raging against complacency, naming the violence brought into shared spaces, the silence that replaces the divine, the blood left suspended in the air — ring against the walls of an imagined club interior that feels constructed from the same corroded materials as the music itself.

TRSSX’s own productions punctuate the journey with an integrity that comes from refusing distance between the selector and the selected. His “Avoid the Confrontation” and “Shifting Material Alignments” — the former on his own Wodawater label (co-run with his brother Kuba Château, originally founded in Kraków in 2017), the latter on Zhark — sit within the mix not as ego insertions but as genuine sonic siblings to the surrounding material. His most recent Wodawater release, Potentialities in Anticipation of Going to Waste, has been described by DJ Mag’s Henry Ivry as “a blistering techno workout left in a vat of sulfuric acid,” and it is precisely this corroded vitality that characterizes TRSSX’s work: live modular synthesis recordings that embrace rawness as a compositional principle, where divergence, incongruity, and tautology exist in deliberate tension with their opposites.

In the records

The techno section proper materializes gradually around the first hour — motorik 4/4 patterns emerging like structural columns from fog. Yet this is not the accelerated, event-driven techno of contemporary festival circuits. It is older, more patient, rooted in a tradition where rhythm is foundation rather than spectacle. The inclusion of Gathaspar’s “Powstanie” — a 2012 release from the Polish label Thema, its title meaning “uprising” in Polish — adds a specifically Central European inflection, a reminder that TRSSX’s musical DNA runs through Kraków as much as Glasgow. Mike Parker’s “Forward” in its Donato Dozzy remix and the Pact Infernal track remixed by Lucy further extend the mix’s industrial techno vocabulary into territories of subterranean pressure and controlled hallucination. Stanislav Tolkachev’s “Dig Them Later” on Semantica — from the Ukrainian producer who recently performed at EXIT — introduces a textured, hallucinatory quality that bends time perception until the listener is no longer certain whether the music is accelerating or the room is contracting.

It is worth noting the mixing itself, which across this eighty-six-minute span operates with a patience and spatial awareness that mirrors the music’s own values. Three turntables run simultaneously for much of the recording — not as a technical flourish but as a compositional method, allowing TRSSX to maintain a persistent textural foundation while introducing and withdrawing elements above and below it. Transitions are long, sometimes extending over a full minute, during which the blended frequencies of two or three records generate previously nonexistent harmonic combinations — phantom overtones, ghost melodies, accidental chords that dissolve as quickly as they appear. TRSSX handles the mixer’s EQ with the discipline of someone who understands precisely what each frequency curve represents, trimming and shaping with minimal intervention. There is never a sense of excess; every adjustment serves the narrative. The result is not twenty-seven discrete tracks but a single, continuous organism — as smooth and adhesive as pulled caramel, to borrow a metaphor that captures both its viscosity and its warmth.

The descent begins well before the listener recognizes it. Somewhere past the hour mark, the mix’s center of gravity starts to drop. The techno structures do not so much conclude as erode — rhythmic elements slowly drowning in expanding atmospheres, as if the club’s concrete walls were gradually filling with dark water. This is the roller coaster toward the abyss that the mix has been building toward since its first drone: a downward trajectory where density increases, the sound thickens and clots, where what was techno becomes something heavier, slower, more saturated — like a speeding tire’s rubber grinding into asphalt in slow motion, the deceleration itself becoming a source of terrible beauty.

Karim Maas & Stave’s “D.A.T.” on UVB-76 Music and Huren’s “MRTVI” on Zhark — a track whose title means “dead” in several Slavic languages — serve as transitional agents between the world of structured rhythm and the formless void beyond it. TRSSX confesses that he “almost thought that Huren track would be too long and too static,” but recognized its self-disintegrating qualities: the way its final section seems to consume itself from within, leaving only the residue of what was once a beat. This is the hinge on which the mix’s entire architecture pivots — the precise moment where the club section yields to something more internal, more exposed.

Maurizio Cascella’s “Elements” on Love Blast and Pavel Milyakov’s “302” on The Trilogy Tapes — the Berlin-based multidisciplinary artist also known as Buttechno, who has transitioned from dancefloor-oriented work toward deeper sonic experiments under his birth name — contribute to this interstitial zone where rhythm becomes vestigial and texture becomes primary. It is worth noting that Milyakov has been one of the most vocal figures in the electronic music world in his opposition to Russia’s war against Ukraine: since the full-scale invasion in 2022, he has directed all proceeds from his releases and Patreon to Ukrainian defense and humanitarian charities, released the pointedly titled Yalta, Ukraine with all income going to the same cause, and has consistently called on artists to take personal responsibility and openly condemn the regime. His presence in this tracklist — in a mix built on the ethics of real human solidarity and resistance to the mediated and the false — resonates beyond the purely sonic. Andrea Riffo’s “Fissure State” on Platz Für Tanz compounds the erosion: the title itself speaks of fracture, of the moment when a seemingly solid surface reveals the stress lines that will eventually unmake it.

By the seventy-eighth minute, rhythm has fully dissolved. What remains is drone, cosmic debris, morphing shapes without fixed form — unmoored frequencies that drift like the luminous particulate matter visible in deep ocean darkness. Drew McDowall’s “And Lions Will Sing With Joy” — a fourteen-minute piece from his 2024 album on Dais Records, in which shrouded electronics and spectralist orchestration surge into uneasy crescendos before revealing mutated choral voices and sparkling harp — represents a kind of secular transfiguration: the moment when the mix stops being about the body and addresses whatever lies beyond it. McDowall, the former Coil collaborator whose lifelong engagement with the Scottish pibroch tradition (an elegiac solo bagpipe form used for laments and tributes to the dead) informs even his most electronic work, provides the perfect bridge between EXIT’s subterranean present and the spectral afterlife that awaits when the last record stops spinning.

And then, the final station: Cindytalk’s “The Ghost Never Smiles” from 1984. After eighty minutes of carefully constructed descent, TRSSX places us before the very origin of the mix’s aesthetic lineage. Cinder’s tormented vocal — that feral, guttural cry born from Edinburgh punk, This Mortal Coil sessions, and the personal alchemy of gender transformation — arrives not as nostalgia but as prophecy fulfilled. The stretched guitar, the irregular percussive figures like a failing heartbeat, the screams and cries — this is the agonized post-punk that preceded, by decades, the industrial and drone music that constitutes the mix’s middle body. Hearing it at the end rather than the beginning inverts chronology: the source is revealed only after its consequences have been fully experienced. What was once a beginning — 1984, post-punk, Edinburgh — becomes the final word, closing the circle with a six-minute meditation on the impossibility of joy in the face of the unspeakable.

“I wanted for the ending to feel like an arrival to some place,” TRSSX admits, “not necessarily a joyous moment, but profound, intense, poignant. I’m not good with happy mix endings.” This is an understatement. What he has achieved is closer to what the painter Anselm Kiefer accomplishes in his monumental canvases — works where scorched earth, lead, ash, and straw are layered into surfaces that are simultaneously devastated and transcendent. Kiefer’s Sternenfall (Falling Stars) shares with this mix a quality of aftermath that is somehow also preamble — the sense that destruction and creation are not sequential but simultaneous, that the deepest listening happens in the ruins.

The all-vinyl nature of the recording is not incidental to this reading. In a cultural moment increasingly dominated by the frictionless, the instant, the algorithmically curated, the decision to work exclusively with physical records — many of them acquired through direct exchange with the artists who made them — constitutes a quiet but firm resistance. Vinyl is heavy. It degrades. It requires physical storage, careful handling, dedicated equipment. It introduces surface noise, the crackle of accumulated play, the possibility of the needle jumping. These are not deficiencies but features — evidence of a medium that bears the marks of its use, that accumulates history in its very material. When TRSSX places the needle on a record that was handed to him by its maker at EXIT’s bar, the circuit of creation, distribution, and reception closes into something intimate and irreducible. The record becomes a relic in the anthropological sense: an object charged with the energy of the interactions that produced and transmitted it.

It is this insistence on the real — real spaces, real objects, real encounters — that distinguishes TRSSX’s project from the broader landscape of contemporary industrial techno. Where many of his contemporaries inhabit the genre as aesthetic, TRSSX inhabits it as ethics. The club is not a venue; it is a proposition about how human beings might exist together in the presence of sound. The mix is not a showcase; it is evidence that such coexistence is possible, and that it produces something more coherent, more nourishing, and more dangerous than anything the digital simulacrum can offer.

A curious thing becomes apparent when the tracklist is viewed from the perspective of this journal’s own history. A remarkable number of the artists TRSSX has gathered here — Kareem, ASC, JK Flesh, Stave, Huren, Drew McDowall, and several others — have at various points over the past fifteen years recorded exclusive mixes or given interviews for Secret Thirteen. Some were among the journal’s earliest contributors; others arrived at symbolically weighted moments in its archive. The overlap was not engineered — TRSSX assembled his tracklist from the logic of his record shelves and the reality of his dancefloor, not from any awareness of our publishing history. Yet the convergence is striking, and perhaps inevitable: a journal and a mix that share the same commitments — to depth over spectacle, to the unfashionable and the uncompromising — will naturally gravitate toward the same names. What this tracklist confirms, in its own indirect way, is that the lineage is continuous. The artists who defined this journal’s early identity are the same artists a younger generation is discovering through vinyl, through clubs, through the kind of real encounters that no algorithm can replicate.

There is perhaps a final observation worth making. EXIT — the club, the philosophy, the name — exists within a building whose long-term future, like that of so many independently run cultural spaces across Europe, is not guaranteed. This is not unique to Glasgow; from Vilnius to Berlin to Lisbon, the spaces where underground culture takes root tend to occupy the margins of urban planning — buildings whose value is measured in heritage listings and square-metre yields rather than in the weight of what happens inside them. Real spaces, like real records, are vulnerable. They can be scratched, warped, repurposed. Their fragility is what makes them matter. TRSSX has built something that exists in this precarious present tense — and has made a mix that will outlast whatever happens to its walls. This is not optimism. It is something harder and more useful: the stubborn insistence that temporary things can carry permanent weight.

Samways’ relationship with Secret Thirteen is foundational; in 2012, he inaugurated our Spotlight series (STS 001), establishing a bond that has endured for almost 15 years. Despite his relative youth, his discography and curatorial work carry the depth of someone who has lived through the genre’s multiple lifecycles. Whether through his solo power electronics output, the now defunct collective No Master, No Servant—whose recordings still weave industrial and EBM with haunted acoustic atmospheres—or his early involvement with Sacred Bones’ The Pink Noise, Samways remains a dedicated audio archaeologist, digging in the dirt where others fear to tread.

A signal carved into the timeline

Secret Thirteen Mix 313 is not merely a recording—it is a sigil carved into the journal’s timeline. Clocking in at a symbolic 3 hours and 13 minutes, it aligns perfectly with our numerology to mark a new chapter. Beyond the numbers, this selection operates as a physiological response to existential dread. The process was an act of isolation: conceived while wandering Nova Scotia’s rural landscapes, immersed in the sounds for weeks, Samways constructed this narrative around a singular, gnawing question—what does it mean to be human these days?

In the records

A sonic mirror held to a world where moral language has become decoration for atrocity. In Civilization and Its Discontents, Freud argued that civilization is built upon the systematic repression of our most fundamental instincts—aggression, desire, the death drive itself. This mix is the sound of those instincts refusing to stay buried, tearing through the concrete foundations of a society that promised safety in exchange for submission. A pharmacological overdose of reality—a dive into the cellular level of suffering and resistance. Unlike the crowds described by Gustave Le Bon in The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind—masses who hunger only for comforting illusions and emotional contagion—this music is designed for the isolated, thinking individual. It offers no consolation, no belonging through surrender. Only the jagged edge of truth for those who refuse to be swept away.

Noise as a document

The narrative moves between visceral Power Electronics, Death Industrial, and pure Noise, using spoken word cuts and samples to critique the crumbling walls of late capitalism. A history lesson delivered through abrasion. Hear Brighter Death Now’s genre-defining aggression (“In Degradation We Trust,” released on Flesh Prison in 2021) and the clinical coldness of Haus Arafna—reminding us this music was never about provocation for its own sake. It was always about documenting the ugliness of the human condition with unflinching precision.

Yet this mix is not a museum of past transgressions—it is a living, breathing entity. Samways weaves in Mark Solotroff’s suffocating atmospheres (“Immediately After Vanishing”) and the explicit rejection of The Vomit Arsonist’s “I Do Not Want to be a Part of This”—titles functioning as slogans for a society in decline. By bridging these legends with the modern visceral intensity of Puce Mary, Pharmakon, and Theologian, he creates a dialogue between the originators and the new blood.

Unreleased and self-released material—from THRTDSPLY to Mouth Wound—embodies the DIY ethos Samways champions as “sonic magic.” These tracks are not products created for an algorithm; they are artifacts of survival. In an era where cancel culture has replaced dialogue with punishment, where nuance is erased by the demand for instant judgment, this selection operates as counter-offensive. A sanctuary of ugliness—an uncompromising expression that exists outside commerce, comfort, and easy consumption.

As the mix progresses, noise ceases to be assault and becomes meditation. As Samways puts it: “there’s a release in surrendering to sound that has no obligation to be pleasant.” The wall of sound washes away the anxiety of the mundane, leaving only a pure, vibrating void. This shift becomes palpable with Lussuria (“Unliving In This Marble History”) and Heaven Axis—the project of Matthew and Morgan Hall, whose unreleased track here signals a return for the label. Assault gives way to low frequency worship: vast, empty spaces mirroring the isolation of the modern individual.

The final hour carries the weight of a collapsing star, its density almost gravitational. The collaboration between Vatican Shadow, Salford Electronics, and Ancient Methods signals a gathering of forces—not to prevent the collapse, but to bear witness together. A rhythmic unity before the end.

For Juan and Simone

The journey culminates in heartbreak. After hours of attrition, the mix resolves into “Still Life” by Silent Servant, released on Flesh Prison. A profound memento mori to Juan Mendez—friend, legend, reminder of existence’s fragility. A moment of silence after the war. Amidst the chaos of global affairs, wars waged without consequence, the rot of systems that have abandoned any pretense of serving the common good—the individual human spirit remains the only thing truly sacred. We dedicate this mix to the memory of Juan and his wife Simone.

MITH-XX on the mix

Beyond the internet’s corruption of creativity over the past few generations, we now face the looming threat of artificial intelligence, only one of many problematic infringements not mentioned here. It is solely because of those who remain persistent—staying true to their craft and influencing new generations—that this legacy continues. True practitioners of magic.

Against these ties that seek to keep us down, an underground persists—one where people continue to produce sonic magic. What was once a full-blown, booming industry has become a celebrated labor of love. Live concerts are organized, fringe record stores keep their doors open, labels and collectives continue to produce physical media—a community existing as it should.

While some people are undoubtedly finding new ways to live, I am increasingly aware of a rapid decline in human decency. Unless one comes from generational wealth, necessities like housing, food, transportation, and any education beyond the bare minimum are becoming severely out of reach. Rent stagnates against rising inflation, the housing crisis deepens, and even the simple act of sustaining oneself feels intentionally constrained. Cancel culture, with intent rooted in accountability, has become harmful in replacing dialogue with punishment and reduces complex human beings to single moments or accusations. It discourages risk, experimentation, and honest expression, fostering fear rather than growth. When nuance is erased and permanence is imposed on mistakes, culture stagnates and the possibility of learning, change, or redemption is lost. These are mere examples of the difficulties artists’ face when creating art not for mass approval, but as an uncompromising expression that exists outside commerce, comfort, and easy consumption.

Existential dread feels less like a private affliction and more like a reasonable response to the daily news: wars waged without consequence, treaties ignored, and moral language used as decoration rather than restraint. International law, once framed as a fragile safeguard, now appears optional for the powerful and irrelevant for everyone else, exposing how little is truly sacred in global affairs. In this atmosphere, meaning erodes — not because people stop caring, but because the systems meant to embody shared values no longer even pretend to protect them. Largely neglected by the media, the streets tell a different story—one that is a war in itself. The common denominators remain the same: pain and suffering, with outcomes that feel indistinguishable—death, or a hollow, meaningless existence. It’s only becoming increasingly more difficult to survive. The walls of capitalism are caving in, crushing those inside while those who built them flee the rubble.

Artists included in this mix such as Roger Karmanik (Brighter Death Now), Mark Solotroff (Intrinsic Action, Bloodyminded), David Padbury (Salford Electronics, The Grey Wolves) and Haus Arafna are critical to the development of the post-industrial movement, also known as Power Electronics or Death Industrial. Using the template laid out by Throbbing Gristle and Industrial Records, not by imitation, but by adopting their method, ethics, and intent. Using art as confrontation, operating outside institutional control, and engaging technology critically. It means prioritizing autonomy, physical presence, and underground community while accepting risk and resisting commodification. Most importantly, the legacy survives only by refusing nostalgia and responding honestly to the conditions of the present. In a more stripped down sonic form and not-so-different direction, the elements of pure unadulterated noise were more focused on, examples of being Incapacitants, Merzbow and The Haters.

While similar themes and ethos recur throughout this selection, the focus on pure noise functions as a cathartic, meditative release—one that resists boundaries entirely. The work is not always made for the listener, and the listener is not always listening for comfort. There’s a release in surrendering to sound that has no obligation to be pleasant. The lack of structure allows emotions that produce anger and anxiety to surface and dissipate without being named. By contrast, more post industrial and dark ambient influences work through atmosphere rather than assault. Slow-moving drones, low frequency worship, and empty spaces create a feeling of vastness or isolation.

The tracklist is a combination of unreleased material, self-released works, live recordings, and formally released tracks, all produced within the last five years. Although this represents only a small fraction of the exceptional work currently being made, I’ve included artists who have been active anywhere from the last five decades to the present—artists who remain vital and whose work I deeply admire. This is merely a reflection of a much broader field of music that influences me for many different reasons, but it is a history that continues to shape my own practice. I believe these forms of expression to be among the most powerful acts of protest.