Thirty-six tracks occupy two hours and four minutes in Swarm Intelligence’s contribution to Secret Thirteen. The arithmetic gives each title an average of three minutes and twenty-seven seconds, yet nothing about the mix suggests impatience. It reveals something more consequential: overlap is not merely a transition technique here, but the principal compositional material. Records do not queue politely and surrender the room one after another. Their shadows coexist. A resonance introduced by Monolake can remain psychologically active when Xenakis enters. The grain of Merzbow alters how Tim Hecker’s melody is heard, while Kareem’s repeated appearances accumulate into an internal structure long before the final industrial pressure takes hold. What first seems like a formidable tracklist gradually loses its divisions and behaves as one extended work, rising by density, memory and changing physical weight rather than by the blunt administration of tempo.

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.

“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.”

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

There is a way electro can be misunderstood when it is treated only as a style, reduced to the snare, the vocoder, the chrome bassline, the old fantasy of machines discovering funk. Elmer Davy’s contribution to Secret Thirteen resists that reduction from the first minutes. It is electro, absolutely and without apology, but it is also a map of affinities where northern Spain listens to Detroit and Birmingham, León answers Barcelona and Madrid, and contemporary Spanish producers are placed beside Finnish dirt, British precision, Dutch reissues of Detroit pressure and New York’s early computer-age optimism. The mix moves with a kind of compact generosity. It is not frantic. It is not didactic. It is dark, but not joyless. It has the physical intelligence of someone who has spent years with records, learning not only what they contain, but how long their shadows are.

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.

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.

There are mixes that identify an artist by repeating the sound for which that artist is already known. NX1 do something far more revealing here. They withdraw from the functional surface of their own techno language and let the sources beneath it speak in uneven light. Drexciyan water pressure seeps into Spanish industrial shadow, cassette-culture corrosion rubs against low-BPM introspection, dub gravity opens into ritual electronics, and Coil’s dark synthetic river waits at the end like an exit with no floor. It is not a DJ set in the ordinary sense, and it is not an eclectic playlist disguised as one. It is a sequence of objects handled with care by two people who understand that influence is not a list of references, but a private system of gravity.

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.

“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.

There is a particular quality to the music a person carries from adolescence into adulthood — not a nostalgic softening, but an intensification, a calcification of emotional truth around specific sounds. The pre-party tape playing through a cracked speaker. The seven-inch single discovered through a classified ad in the back of a music magazine. The cassette pressed in an edition of ten copies, handed out rather than sold, evaporating before it could be catalogued. For Anders Karlsson — the Stockholm-based EBM architect, hardware obsessive and post-punk convert who records as Celldöd — these formative transactions with music constitute not a chapter behind him but a continuous gravitational field. His is a practice shaped by the ethics of DIY before he had words for those ethics: cassettes released on his own Brutal Disciplin label, solo performances where technical failure becomes compositional method, productions for Kess Kill and Suction Records and Medical Records and Femur Records that fold the abrasive angularity of early EBM into something more unruly, more personal, more resistant to genre. His previous contribution to these pages — Secret Thirteen Mix 259, exploring the punk aesthetics compressed within electronic music's wider genealogy — established the lineage from which this new mix descends and expands.

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.

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.

There are spaces that exist not to entertain but to subtract — to strip away the accumulated noise of a hyperconnected world and replace it with something older, more tactile, more necessary. EXIT, the DIY club and arts space at 96 Maxwell Street in Glasgow's city centre, is one such space. Since September 2023, when Miko Szatko — the Polish-born, Glasgow-based musician, DJ and producer who records as TRSSX — co-founded it alongside James Johnson (JayJay), EXIT has become a vital artery in the city's underground body. A 400-capacity basement in a B-listed building, it operates on principles that sound almost radical in their simplicity: artist-run programming, sliding-scale tickets, unpredictable lineups, no genre allegiance. Its name is both instruction and philosophy — an exit from the simulated, the algorithmic, the disembodied. As Szatko puts it himself: "a place where the current world can be left behind for a while."

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.

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.