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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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