It was a Monday evening in Dallas, Texas, and I was at a bowling alley inside a shopping mall with a bunch of guys in their 40s. Brian Bishop was winning, but Eric Estornel—better known as Maceo Plex—wasn't far behind. We were one of the only groups in the place, and Estornel got one of his kids to send a bluetooth speaker in an Uber so he could play an old radio mix of his from 1996, back when he was called Eric Entity and had just won a "bedroom DJ" mix contest.

Also with us was Christine Maars, Estornel's wife; Scottie Canfield, AKA DJ Redeye, a Dallas scene stalwart since the '80s; Gerard Hanson, a legendary producer who makes dub techno as Convextion and electro as E.R.P.; Wanz Dover, AKA Blixaboy, an artist who has made almost every kind of music you could think of over the decades; Coy Wright, of the '90s breakbeat group Paradigm Shift; Bishop, who makes electro as Vectorvision; and his wife Katherine.

In this bowling alley was decades' worth of dance music history from a city whose contributions often go ignored. Maceo Plex is one of the most famous DJs in the world, and Convextion is a cult figure whose records are revered among electro and dub techno heads. Most people I've spoken to, even fans, don't realize these artists came from Dallas.

"If you trace back the history, people will always default back to Los Angeles, Detroit, New York—but people who know their stuff will bring up Orlando and Dallas," said Jeff Kovarsky, a former radio DJ from the '90s who now works as an announcer for the hockey team Dallas Stars.

Dallas's scene has waxed and waned over the years—from the infamous and influential Starck Club in the '80s, to the early ‘90s rave days and the vibrant house music club culture that emerged after—but one of the constants running underneath has been electro. It was always there in the background, coming in and out of prominence. The music is desolate but beautiful, a paradox that inspired the name of Estornel's newest label, Lone Romantic.

Driven by labels like Lone Romantic and a worldwide resurgence of interest in electro, the scene is livelier than it's ever been, with a mix of legends and newcomers all making music. Aside from my bowling crew, there's also Gavin Guthrie, who makes electro and house as TX Connect. He celebrates his home state's electronic music tradition with his label Texas Recordings Underground. Gina Garza, an acolyte of Guthrie's, is a whip-smart DJ who could easily become one of the genre's most in-demand DJs if it weren't for her successful career as a contemporary artist. (At the time of writing, she was spending the summer at an artist residency in Catalonia.) A young artist called Textasy found such quick success that he almost immediately moved to Berlin, and then there's Cygnus, a producer of such preternatural talent that Autechre asked him to go on tour with them when he only had a handful of records out.

The vitality of this scene was on display at Electromagnetic, an all-night party Estornel throws with Corey and Bon Spengler, the duo behind one of the city's best venues, Proton. The lineup that Saturday night was enough to make any electro head drool, with turns from E.R.P., Vectorvision, Blixaboy, Paradigm Shift (for a retro breaks live set) and Lacy Lawson, who DJs as ill76. It was a warehouse party that would stand up to anything in New York or Los Angeles. Even Dallas luminaries who weren't playing came out to dance, including DJ Redeye and Cygnus, who fell asleep in the corner as the party pushed past sunrise. (It went until around noon.)

Electromagnetic is organized by Estornel together with Corey and Bon Spengler, a married couple who also run Proton, a warehouse that's one of the best venues in town for underground electronic music. Otherwise, you're likely to end up at the It'll Do nightclub, a long corridor with a fantastic soundsystem and a light-up LED floor. Raves come in and out of fashion in Dallas depending on police presence and venue availability. EDM is huge, and there are plenty of big-ticket techno events—Adam Beyer played a 1200-person theatre while I was there. But if you're looking for good electronic music, particularly electro, you're likely to end up at Proton, It'll Do or any number of small dive bars around the city.

Rick Simpson, AKA Ricky Silk or DJ R9. Brian Bishop AKA Vectorvision, Wanz Dover AKA Blixaboy, Gina Garza, Phillip Washington aka Cygnus, Gerard Hanson AKA Convextion, Gavin Guthrie AKA TX Connect.

Dallas is the cultural capital of North Texas and, with its neighbour Fort Worth, forms the Metroplex: the fourth-largest urban area in the US. It gave rise to superstars like Erykah Badu and Stevie Ray Vaughan. It's home to many distinct and famous neighbourhoods, most notably Deep Ellum, an entertainment district and the inspiration for the name of Maceo Plex's label, Ellum Audio. Oak Lawn is the traditional gay neighbourhood home to too many gay bars to count, as well of many of the city's dance music institutions like the legendary Oak Lawn Records shop and its self-titled label.

Dallas has always been the South's hotspot for underground dance music. It's home to one of the country's hardest working DJs, Canfield, AKA Red Eye, who's been around since the '80s. As one-half of the NASA Project with Arnold Velasco, he scored an enduring rave hit in the 1992 High Friends In Places EP, which featured the breakbeat hardcore anthem "Dominator Is Dead." Nowadays he helps run a family of labels called Audiophile Live and Audiophile Deep, and he's the resident DJ and talent buyer at It'll Do, Dallas's best club for underground electronic music.

There are a number of famous record stores in Dallas, many of which are still open today. Oak Lawn Records is arguably the most well-known, but there's Josey Records, which has evolved into a beloved local chain with multiple locations, like the Texas version of Amoeba. The one closest to dance music heads' hearts is probably Bill's Records, run by one 73-year-old man who's been selling records for 46 years. He's a quirky guy: I heard from more than one person that he would only let you buy records if he liked you. Many Dallas dance music scenesters once worked there, including Estornel, who was paid for his shifts in records.

When it comes to clubs, one historical venue stands tall over all the rest: the groundbreaking Starck Club. Designed by and named for famed architect Philippe Starck, it was one of the only American clubs whose legacy could hold a candle to legendary venues like the Paradise Garage. Stevie Nicks was an early investor, and it was something of a Texas celebrity hangout, hosting all kinds of events that drew even the likes of a young George W. Bush.

Starck was known for its wide-open music policy, encompassing industrial, EBM, goth, house, electro and Italo, as well as a truly mixed crowd you rarely see at a club in the US. The club is also notorious for selling MDMA at the bar in 1984, before the drug was outlawed in Texas. Some have credited Starck Club with creating the cultural link between ecstasy and dance music in the first place. The club had a number of influential DJs like Rick Squillante, Mike DuPriest, and, towards the end, Jeff Kovarsky. The music they played—a wide but specific array of genres that included house, EBM, industrial and synth pop—laid the blueprint for a small but powerful scene that still exists 30 years later.

The Starck Club shut down in 1989, around the same time that dance music's historical interest in Dallas seems to end. But the story doesn't stop there. The Starck Club was only one entry in a musical timeline that paints Dallas as a mini-Detroit. They even had their version of the Electrifying Mojo in Dr. Rock, an old Dr. Dre associate and LA transplant who moved over to the Metroplex in the mid-'80s and started up a radio show.

"You would always hear electro on the radio," said Rick Simpson, AKA Ricky Silk, slowly turning red over a few rounds of Manhattans at an Oak Lawn dive bar called The Grapevine. "Dr. Rock did a radio show and he would mix in Kraftwerk and stuff I didn't even know back then. That was always an influence here."

Simpson is the definition of an O.G. Hailing from Fort Worth, he started coming to Dallas to party and dance when he was barely old enough to drive. Now deep into his forties and speaking with a slow North Texas drawl, he has the casual air of someone who isn't trying to be particularly cool or showy—but he's among the genre's most talented DJs and enduring figures. He eats, sleeps and breathes the stuff. (Cygnus told me that Simpson was a "fortress of knowledge.") While he reminisced with me, he was trying to get in touch with Michael Johnson from Dallas electro act Plastic Sleeves, and every time he grabbed his phone, his lock screen would flash Drexciya's aquaman logo.

"There were teen clubs back then," he told me. "There was one in Fort Worth, which introduced me to Depeche Mode and dancing and electronic music in general. Then the rave scene came to Dallas a little bit later and I got involved with that. I was about 17 when I started DJing. I would play Lil Louis, house music, UK hardcore and rave. Then we started faxing orders for records into stores like Gramaphone [in Chicago] and Submerge [in Detroit]."

Simpson brought up a little-known connection between Dallas and Detroit that endured for years. Artists in Detroit knew something was happening in Dallas—Submerge, the Detroit record store and UR headquarters, shipped records there all the time, and artists from the area came to Detroit often. There's a persistant rumour Juan Atkins' Metroplex label was named for the Dallas-Fort Worth Metroplex (though Atkins says he got the word from American futurist writer Alvin Toffler). The more you dig, though, the more it becomes apparent that Dallas was something of a second city for Detroit music.

Rick Simpson, AKA Ricky Silk

"We had all these records coming from Detroit," Gerard Hanson, AKA Convextion, explained. "Dallas was a big market for Cybotron, Model 500 etc. You would hear Cybotron everywhere. You'd hear it in the clubs, in the skatepark. And the club right next to it was always playing electro."

Detroit and Dr. Rock were two constants for Hanson. Having started his career in 1995, he is the archetypal artist of Dallas techno and electro. Inspired in part by the expanse of outer space and a general love of sci-fi, his music sounds lonely, melancholy and beautiful. Through his two main aliases, Convextion (techno) and E.R.P. (electro), he has a small but devoted following on both sides of the pond, with an especially strong following in Europe, where he's played most of his gigs in recent years. In terms of atmospheric techno and electro, it's hard to imagine music more soulful than Hanson's.

"A lot of people are influenced by Gerard," Bishop told me. "A lot of people got into it because of him, because of just having him around."

I met Hanson on a Sunday night at an empty Waffle House. It was the culmination of years of trying to sit down with him. Though he's an outgoing, boisterous guy once you can pin him down, he's notoriously shy when it comes to press. When I first emailed him about an interview, he asked, "Why would anyone want to talk to me?" But his story is an integral part of Dallas electro.

"I was just into noises—like, any sound from the environment. That got me into electronic music," he said. "Around '91, I was going to pawn shops and looking for gear. I was going out around then too. Before that, I would just go and look for records. I would go to record conventions and try to find stuff that had synths—Chris & Cosey. Eventually I got into techno, just through digging. It was everywhere back then."

In the mid-'90s, Hanson started a label and zine called Hard Sync with his friend Dan Kurzius. They released music from Hanson's two earliest aliases, I/O and Syne Language. Then he put out a couple Convextion records on the Detroit label Matrix, including an untitled track, later known as "Miranda," that would become a techno classic. He also debuted his electro alias, Event Related Potential, which has since landed releases on Semantica, Frustrated Funk and Solar One.

"When I first put out records, I had no understanding of what was happening," Hanson said. "I was just working a lot. There wasn't much internet, I was disconnected from it all. Making music was all I did in my spare time. I didn't know who was listening to my music. I didn't know if anyone was. It was always a surprise to me."

From the beginning, Gerard had his fair share of listeners both in Detroit and in Dallas. Minto George, who later started the Down Low Music label that would release much of Hanson's music, was an early fan, and was determined to help get his music out there.

"Listening to Gerard was like hearing my favourite early Detroit techno records for the first time," George told me over email. "He created a lot of music, most of which was very personal and not with the intention of being released. I kept thinking, why was he keeping all this insanely good stuff to himself and not sharing it?"

"There was about a three, four-year gap between the first two Convextion releases on Matrix and the next time anyone heard anything from Gerard," George added. "One day I borrowed a plastic storage box full of DATs from Gerard and spent three days in my university library listening to them over and over again... This is how we assembled the beginnings of an album, before Down Low even existed. His music drew interest from a lot of very well-known labels."

Hanson was oblivious to this. "I didn't really know that my music was a thing until the mid-2000s," he said. "I had already quit music. I just wanted to do other stuff. I was working all the time. I just wanted to goof off, hang out."

After a brief hiatus, Minto's Down Low Music label put out the self-titled Convextion album in 2006, which became something of a classic in dub techno circles. Then Hanson switched his focus to E.R.P., making a string of records that solidified the Dallas electro sound: melodic, lonesome, atmospheric and beautiful.

After our meal, Hanson took me in his beat-up car—where he seemed to only ever play Cocteau Twins—to The Church, a goth night that's been happening at the all-ages Lizard Lounge in Deep Ellum for 28 years. That night, DJ Virus, another long-time Dallas DJ, was holding court. The music was an eclectic blend of '80s goth and synth pop, industrial music, late '90s stuff like Marilyn Manson and Rob Zombie, with some brostep and wacky remixes (the Mortal Kombat theme song) thrown in for good measure.

It was packed and the crowd was dedicated, with most people dressed up in outlandish makeup, leather and electrical tape. Almost all the dance music heads I knew seemed enthralled by Virus's DJ set, which underlined the common thread between electro, goth and even some strains of mainstream EDM.

"In the '90s, there were two or three big parties going on every weekend, and a good club scene," Rick Simpson told me at The Grapevine. "You'd go out to the club midweek, go to a club on the weekend and there'd be a rave afterwards. It was just non-stop crazy."

Dance music was still on the radio, too. In addition to Dr. Rock, Jeff Kovarsky had a show called Thud Slap on the renowned community radio station KNON, which he said was mostly for "aggressive industrial music." As the rave scene took over, Kovarsky's tastes broadened and so did his radio broadcast, which eventually moved to KDGE, then known as The Edge, where he hosted Edgeclub. With Edgeclub, Kovarsky expanded the the show's focus, inviting guests from around Texas, the US and Europe to do mixes.

I spoke over the phone with Kovarsky, who seemed proud of his legacy and eager to talk about the past. "We were very fortunate in Dallas," he said. "Dallas embraced rave culture ahead of the curve. There were warehouse parties and raves in abandoned smokestacks. There were parties being thrown in fields. And Dallas was also influential because of what we were able to do in the early '90s on a radio station."

Kovarsky did the Midnight Mix, which would sometimes broadcast live from The Church. They would feature guest DJs and host DJ competitions to encourage local talent, which was how Estornel, then known as Eric Entity, made his introduction to the dance music world. He won two years in a row.

Estornel's contest-winning radio mix marked the rise of Dallas breaks and electro. It was around this time that Hanson debuted E.R.P. and the duo Paradigm Shift put out their self-titled album (an essential piece of American breakbeat history full of soaring vocals and hip-hop influenced drums). Breaks and electro went hand-in-hand, and suddenly, the electro that ruled Dallas radio in the '80s was creeping its way back in amidst the dominant sounds of house and techno.

Dallas was well-represented by Down Low Music, the label founded by Minto George and JT Stewart, AKA $tinkworx, in 1999. Aside from putting out music from Hanson, whose releases had their own set of catalogue numbers, Down Low might be known best for Messages From Machines, by Dallas duo Plastic Sleeves, a holy grail for electro heads. For further electro cred, the only other Plastic Sleeves record, Robo Sexual, came out on legendary Dutch label The Bunker. (Helena Hauff recently highlighted Plastic Sleeves as one of her favourite acts.)

George and Stewart first met via Hyperreal's 313 mailing list, a sort of proto-message board centered around dance music coming out of Detroit. It was a typical story: the two had their own music, and music from their friends, and no home for any of it.

"The late '90s saw a resurgence of techno, but it felt like a shell of its former self, so we became frustrated and decided that releasing our own vision of the music was the right move," George said. "Dallas has always been a premiere music scene... And we did have a run for about six years where we put on events around the city and tried to push not only electro but the deeper sounds of techno, house and more obscure music."

Down Low's catalogue is arguably the most impressive and comprehensive document of Dallas's scene. Highlights include Satellite Cities, a compilation EP showing off Dallas electro artists whose music feels like a blueprint for today's scene. Also worth checking out are Minto George's duo Phrenic and a relatively rare collaborative project between Legowelt and Orgue Electronique called Macho Cat Garage. (Legowelt's Polarius alias made a Down Low appearance as well.)

Wanz Dover, AKA Blixaboy

On Sunday afternoon, I was eating fried chicken with Wanz Dover, AKA Blixaboy, while a bar band played Fleetwood Mac covers. Dover is Dallas's Renaissance man. In addition to his electro project, he's been in all kinds of bands, put on shows and festivals, and worked as a music journalist for a local paper. He talks in an assured but long-winded way, a precise stream-of-consciousness. He's one of those music nerds who likes almost everything, and wants to be an expert about almost everything, too.

But right now, electro seems to be one of his main passions, and he's good at it. His roots in electronic music, aside from a longstanding love of IDM and old electro (before he knew what it was called), stretch back to when he used to put on Laptop Deathmatch parties in Dallas, as part of a wider national network of events that led up to a country-wide contest in Seattle each year.

The rules were simple: you had a laptop, an audio interface and a MIDI interface, and three minutes to make the gnarliest, craziest thing you could muster. They would have 15 people at a time, but three artists stood out in those early days: Blixaboy, Hanson and a young guy named Phillip Washington, who called himself Cygnus.

"That's how I met Cygnus," Dover said. "And for the longest time, the winners went... Cygnus! Wanz! Cygnus! Cygnus! Cygnus! Wanz! Some other guy! Wanz!"

"Gerard had been all but retired at that point—early 2000s—and he started going out to the Deathmatches, he thought they were cool," he added. "He was just friends with my girlfriend, I didn't know who Convextion was. He doesn't tell anyone shit! Deathmatch were his first shows back after retirement."

Once the Deathmatches ran their course, Dover was in search of something new, so he went to Detroit, which he called his "finding Wakanda moment." A near-death experience and the ensuing recovery period led Dover to dive deeper into his newfound interest in electro.

"I was sick, I had a ruptured colon," he told me. "I was just fooling around. I got more into the Detroit electro stuff. It connected modern electro with my favourite elementary school music from the '80s, when I was wearing parachute pants, checkered Vans, rising sun bandana, cut-off sleeve shirts. We'd go outside and play and fight over who gets to be Ozone and who gets to be Turbo. I was a huge Krautrock junkie in the '90s and Kraftwerk was a big part of that, too. And then I sent my electro stuff to CPU and I was signed three hours later. 25 years of making music... And then that? That's how it happens."

Across town in Oak Cliff, I met Phillip Washington, or Cygnus, at a combination book store and bar. He's a soft-spoken guy who gets excitable if you ask him about the right things. Like Dover, he's dedicated his life to music, an interest he inherited from his parents. Laptop Deathmatch came when he was fresh out of high school, and he dove right into it.

"I was making IDM drill & bass craziness," he said. "The impression that I wanted to leave on the audience was shock and awe. That's diametrically opposed to the impression I go for now, which is smoothness and funk, etc."

Of all the electro producers in Dallas, Washington is probably the most musical, certainly the most funky. He's known for singing on his tracks with a vocoder, a tradition that goes back to the roots of hip-hop with artists like Egyptian Lover. He's also prolific. When I spoke him he had just self-released an album as well as an EP on CPU, and he was already showing me the mockup for his next album, on Fundamental Records, which came out a few weeks after our meeting. Electro isn't all he does, but it's what he does best.

"I had always been writing electro music," he said. "I loved freestyle, Drexciya, Ultradyne, Model 500. I think around 2008 or 2009, I was writing hip-hop electroacoustic weirdness, but on the side I was making electro for fun. Tom Knapp, who ran a label called Icasea, asked me for a release. I sent him a bunch of songs—like 45—with around 15 electro songs. And he said, 'Why don't we put out a Juan Atkins-style electro album?' People loved it. Then we did another electro release, a cassette that's very valuable now. Since then I've been putting out electro releases. I can write a lot of stuff, but this was like a chain reaction."

The reaction to Washington's early releases was swift and positive, but it mostly came from outside Dallas. Chris Smith tapped him to do the first release on Sheffield label Central Processing Unit, which has since become one of the leading lights in electro. Autechre, his heroes, asked him to open for them on their North American tour in 2015, though he still felt like an outlier even then.

"I was writing live sets that were electro, and no one else was doing it. I'm not throwing shade—that's just how it was. I was met by so many people who were my heroes and colleagues and they were like, 'Why are you making that shit?' And I was like, 'It's electro, it sounds cool!' The more people told me to stop doing it, the more I wanted to."

Phillip Washington aka Cygnus

Meanwhile, over in a nearby college town called Denton, Gavin Guthrie was switching gears from an experimental rock band called Florene into straight-up dance music. (A brutal Pitchfork review tanked the band's prospects, or so Guthrie says.) He got into Detroit techno, Chicago house and other strains of dance music through a friend who had a project called Testicular Manslaughter, and he fell especially hard for electro, citing acts like DMX Krew, Legowelt and Unit Moebius as some of his early favourites.

Guthrie became a resident at Rubber Gloves in Denton, with a night called Deep Shade, which started out mostly as a house and techno party—the only place you could hear that music in Denton—but which skewed electro once Gina Garza entered the picture. Garza, the contemporary artist, is easily one of the best DJs in Dallas, electro or otherwise. Like most people in the city, she came to electro through her own personal explorations. Her introduction was through Canadian act Lowfish, whose 2000 album Eliminator she found in a used CD store, The strange cover art and alien music mesmerized her.

Garza went to the graduate school in Denton. "I started DJing when I was in graduate school," she said. "I went to SXSW just to visit a friend. We went to go see John Maus play and I met some people and talked about music. I never talked to people about music. I had a conversation with someone who knew about Lowfish and I was like... what? Then Ultradyne came and played in Denton and I was really like... WHAT? It happened really fast. My world of electro wouldn't have blossomed if it wasn't for meeting these people in Denton. It was so random!"

Gina Garza, Gavin Guthrie

Both Garza and Guthrie eventually moved to Dallas, and have become integral parts of the city's scene. Guthrie runs Texas Recordings Underground, which focuses on artists from all around Texas, in several different genres, but has also had a number of important electro releases, like the compilation Cyber_Tex, which featured the first-ever appearance from Textasy. Garza, meanwhile, is a core Dallas DJ and has started to play elsewhere at venues like Chicago's smartbar. She used to hold all-night loft parties at her house before the situation became untenable, thanks mostly to gentrification.

As I spoke with all these DJs, young and old, one thing became clear: Dallas is at something of a cultural crossroads right now. Even Deep Ellum, the city's lauded entertainment district, isn't somewhere you'd go to hear anything other than EDM or rock music these days. But the resurgent electro scene is strong and tight-knit, enough to support parties like Electromagnetic.

"I would compare Dallas to the Dutch electro scene," Bishop told me from his living room, where we were surrounded by vintage space-age furniture. "A small group of people, but we work together, we support each other. Especially four or five years ago, when it really started to get going. Someone like Gavin knew about the younger people that were coming out of Denton. And we still get quite a few people coming from Denton that enter our little world. There's not a huge following for the weirder electro stuff, though younger people are trickling in."

Bishop is a relic of the rave scene going back to the '80s, but it's only recently that he's started to make his own music. His project, inspired by the old Vectrex video game console, is electro worship through and through: he displays the console when he plays, and sometimes adds a slightly creepy-looking mannequin, which calls back to the earliest days of Drexciya member Gerald Donald's Dopplereffekt project.

"People are into sci-fi and technology," he said. "That comes through in our music, there's a futuristic element in all of it. I find futuristic things in industrial, Italo disco, minimal synth, but electro is what you think of when you think 'futuristic.' It's the robotic nature of it. So mechanical. But then with the nice moving strings on top... I think even people who don't know about electronic music would think it sounds futuristic. It almost speaks for itself."

Bishop is also the label manager for Lone Romantic, Eric Estornel's new label for electro music that started in 2017. Lone Romantic also featured the first new release since 2006 from Mariel Ito, Estornel's electro alias. Estornel told me that the name Lone Romantic is meant to signify what makes the Dallas strain of electro so special: the idea of the lonely nerd making beautiful, lovesick music in their bedroom. It's an image that obviously conjures up Gerard Hanson, but it applies to almost everyone in this little scene.

If the music sounds lonely, it belies a a feeling of community that's only getting stronger. A group chat that lingered after I left Dallas showed that the electro bowling gatherings were a regular thing. More people are hosting events big and small, like Rick Simpson's nights at the Tradewinds dive bar, where he held a party while I was across town at Electromagnetic. Electro has always been a part of the fabric of Dallas electronic music, but now it's starting to peek out of the shadows. Talk to enough people and you'll realize it runs in the city's veins. You could compare it to places like Detroit, New York and The Hague, cities that were electro hotspots at one time or another, and all had their own take on the sound.

Brian Bishop

During our meeting, Washington complained that when he started out, people told him not to bother with electro. Now, in today's Dallas, he's come out ahead of the game. "There's a lot of people coming out of nowhere and saying, 'I love electro, I used to breakdance to it...' And I'm like, 'Yeah, whatever, you used to tell me to stop doing it!'"

Guthrie sounded a little more upbeat: "Here, there was nobody to tell us what we can't or can do, what we could mix with what. We do whatever we want to. People in Texas, people my age, come from a more punk or metal or noise background. Then they become aware of dance music and take elements from it, but the background is still innate, inside you."

"I've made myself homeless through this music shit," Washington told me. "It doesn't always give you security, but I know a lot of people here who show me grace and make me happy. Friendships that keep me glued here. I know if I went to Berlin or London, I would be successful, but lonely. You go to Berghain and you're a random particle and it doesn't matter. You go to a party here somewhere like Tradewinds, they're playing electro all night and you know everyone there. I really like that warmth."

With Estornel still living in Dallas half the year, reviving his electro alias and repping hard for the Dallas scene with his label, there's a new energy in the city supported by the rise of artists like Blixaboy, Gina G, Cygnus and Vectorvision. Michael Johnson from Plastic Sleeves told me he got his drum machine repaired and was ready to write some new stuff. And the one constant is that lonely star that's been shining the whole time: Hanson.

"It's like a family here," said Hanson. "They're my friends, I like them personally, and I like what they do. But it seems kind of arbitrary now. I know people who like this music everywhere. I don't think geography is so relevant now. But Dallas, well... Melancholy. We got the pads. I'm kind of hung up on pads. Phillip is great at pads. Everyone that's from here, they're great."

"I don't know why electro is such a thing." He paused. "It's just always been big here."

Gina G: Dallas electro mix

Gina G is one of the best DJs in the South's electro hotspot, Dallas, and this mix shows off her whip-smart style.