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.