Bogotá, CO · electronic pop

Ela Minus

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Colombian synth auteur — protest songs you can dance to, built entirely on hardware and delivered with quiet, glowing defiance.

Gabriela Jimeno grew up in Bogotá, where from age eleven to eighteen she drummed for Ratón Perez, a hardcore band that toured Colombia and built her a name in the country's independent scene. At nineteen she left for the United States, studying jazz drumming and music synthesis at Berklee College of Music in Boston, then worked building synthesizers at Critter & Guitari in New York.

Before recording as Ela Minus, Jimeno worked as a drummer for hire, touring with Austra and Dams of the West as well as her own bands. She built the Ela Minus project as a solo outlet in which she writes, records and produces everything herself, using hardware: drum machines, analogue synths and sequencers, performing live from a table of gear rather than a laptop, and singing in both English and Spanish.

She released her first solo track, Jamaica, in 2015, and built early recognition by playing live only, refusing to DJ, performing entirely with analogue gear at clubs and festivals worldwide. Further EPs followed independently before she signed to Domino Recording Company in 2019, becoming the first Latin American artist on the label's roster.

Her songs pair club-oriented rhythms and warm analogue textures with lyrics about autonomy, rest and resistance, delivered in a soft, close-miked voice. The 2020 album Acts of Rebellion brought her wider attention, and she followed it in January 2025 with a second album, Día, continuing to work in the same self-contained, hardware-based mode.

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electronic pop