Ela Minus Drummed in a Hardcore Band Before She Built Synthesizers
Before she made records on analogue synthesizers, Gabriela Jimeno assembled them. Not as a hobby, and not as an art project — as employment, on a production line at the instrument maker Critter and Guitari.
It is the least likely line on a CV that already contains a teenage hardcore band and a Berklee degree, and it explains more about how Ela Minus records than any of the usual influence-spotting does.
From a Bogotá Hardcore Band to a Berklee Double Major
Jimeno was born in Bogotá in 1990, and her first instrument was the drum kit. From the age of eleven until she was eighteen she played for Ratón Perez, a local hardcore band that toured Colombia, and the run was long enough to earn her a real profile in the country’s independent scene before she had finished school.
At nineteen she left for the United States and Berklee College of Music in Boston. What redirected her was not the curriculum but the city’s clubs, and rather than abandoning one discipline for the other she took both: a double major in jazz drumming and music synthesis.
That pairing is the whole architecture of her music in a single decision. Jazz drumming teaches timing as something elastic and reactive; synthesis teaches sound as something you build from nothing. Most electronic producers arrive with one of those and acquire the other slowly, if ever.
The hardcore years matter too, and not as trivia. A hardcore drummer plays loud, fast, and for a room that is physically responding to her — which is closer to what a club producer needs to understand than a conservatoire education would suggest.
The Day Job That Shaped the Records
After graduating she went to work at Critter and Guitari, building and designing synthesizers. Her own records are made mostly on analogue synths and drum machines, and she has named Kraftwerk and early Daft Punk as touchstones while listing improvisational jazz and techno as the influences underneath.
Knowing an instrument from the inside changes the relationship with it. A producer who has soldered a synth together understands what it will do at its limits, which parts of its behaviour are design decisions and which are accidents, and how far it can be pushed before it stops being useful. That is a different kind of knowledge from having read the manual.
It also tends to produce restraint rather than excess. Her catalogue is compact and unhurried — three self-released EPs, First Words in 2015, Grow in 2016 and Adapt in 2017, then Acts of Rebellion for Domino in 2020, and Día in January 2025, which was met with broad critical praise.
The Domino relationship began in 2020 with a single pointedly titled “they told us it was hard, but they were wrong”, followed that year by “megapunk”, “el cielo no es de nadie” and “dominique”. The run since has kept the same unhurried pace — “Combat”, “Broken” and “Upwards” through 2024, then “QQQQ” and “Ghost Orchid” around Día.
She sings in English and Spanish, which is less a marketing position than a straightforward consequence of who she is and where she has lived. She is now based in Brooklyn.
Nick León Came From the Other Direction
Her collaborator reached similar territory by an entirely different road. Nick León is a Miami-born producer and DJ whose early credits were in rap and pop — work with Denzel Curry, The Underachievers and Rosalía — before the single “Xtasis” brought him international attention and a place in the Latin club movement.
His own description of the work puts it at the intersection of electronic music, hip-hop and global club culture, built from textural experimentation, buried melodies and the sounds of everyday life. His most recent project, A Tropical Entropy, came out through the Medellín label TraTraTrax and takes the contradictions of Miami as its subject.
He has kept both careers running rather than trading one for the other, still taking commercial production work in pop and hip-hop while operating as a figure in the underground, and his sets have moved from Miami dance floors to festivals across Europe and South America. The Fader and XLR8R have both backed the work.
So one half of this partnership learned club music by building the machines, and the other learned it by making rap records and then following the rhythms outward. Neither started in the place they ended up.
What the EP Is, and What It Is Not
Clash reported the details in June: qué les pasó a mis amigos? — “what happened to my friends?” — arrived digitally on 7 August through Smugglers Way, an imprint operating under Domino.
It is an EP rather than an album, which is worth stating plainly because collaborative records between two established producers are often oversold as something larger. The lead track, “espiral”, works club energy without either voice swallowing the other.
A physical edition follows on 20 November: a 12-inch carrying remixes by Loidis, Guedra Guedra and Brenda. Holding the vinyl back three months from the digital release is a deliberate sequencing choice rather than a delay, letting the remixes function as a second release instead of a bonus nobody notices.
The pair are also billed for the first Smuggler’s Way showcase, at London’s ICA on 3 September, alongside Alexis Taylor and Mike Simonetti, and Guedra Guedra — who appears on the remix package as well.
A Second Collaboration, Not a First
This is not new behaviour for her. In 2022 she released “Kiss U” with DJ Python, another producer working in the same broad space between club music and something more interior.
Two collaborative EPs in four years, both with club producers, both outside the main album sequence, suggests a settled way of working: the albums carry the songwriting, and the collaborations are where the rhythm ideas go. That is a healthier division than trying to force both into one record.
Her live history supports the same reading. She has played Coachella twice, in 2022 and 2023, along with Primavera Sound, Pitchfork Music Festival, III Points, Portola and Cruel World, and toured North America with Caribou. That is a festival CV built on performance rather than on a hit.
Why Two Hardware Producers Meet in the Middle
What makes the pairing work on paper is that both of them treat sound as something physical. She learned it at a workbench; he built a body of work out of field texture and the noise of a particular city. Neither approach starts from a preset.
That shared instinct is why a Bogotá-raised, Brooklyn-based synth builder and a Miami rap producer do not sound like a compromise together. They are solving the same problem — how to make electronic music that feels like it was made by hands in a room — from opposite ends of it. Our piece on why guitar bands went back to tracking live covers the same instinct arriving in a very different genre.
For a producer who spent her teens playing hardcore in Colombian venues and her early twenties assembling other people’s instruments, an EP made with a Miami club producer is not a departure. It is the most consistent thing she could have done.
Qué les pasó a mis amigos? is out now on Smugglers Way, with a 12-inch edition on 20 November.
