It’s almost exactly three years since we started this, our Eastern adventures, sonic explorations, meeting amazing people, listening to great musics, climbing up the Soviet monument in Varna with Жълти Стъклa, to visiting cold wave musician and artist Wojciech Bąkowski in his flat in Poznan, chatting to animal activist and artist Penka Popova in Plovdiv, and impromptu broadcasting from the great diy radio Kanal 103 in Skopje at midnight. this video, featuring some shaky footage from our travels, was made by our friends a while ago, maybe it’s time to post it finally ;) Thanks to Fundaluka for making it for us! <3

The Timisoara-based duo Makunouchi Bento make soundtracks for their imaginary movies. At times opulent, adventurous sonic textures are woven into a tapestry of imagination, transporting the listener into non-descript moments in time, a gentle, fragile odyssey that is peculiarly haunting, playful and dreamlike. It’s not a placid lullaby throughout though, there are more uptempo songs in there, too. They have assorted their unreleased tracks, collaborations, and whatnot into two “compilations” so far, a personal retrospective with tracks spanning a decade. 

His podcast is a trademark amalgamation of found sounds (even something lifted out of Ceauşescu’s archive), field recordings, random Romanian hits, and plenty of bass. ”This podcast is about the biggest force that we Romanians possess right now and that is the force of stealing and copying from the other nations,” but as they say talent imitates, genius steals, innit. 

“Makunouchi Bento” might be the Japanese phrase for a typical lunchbox, however this dish is served straight from Romania this time. Waka X and Qewza, are no strangers to our ears, their imaginary soundtracks featured at one of our gigs and radio shows. Their latest release, the Remix Box Ichi, presents their reworkings of their mates from Hungary, Romania and Germany.

The acclaimed producer Ben Mono is featured here with his collab with Jemeni. Adding their typical blend of IDM driven and bleepy sound arsenal, MB push his track Jesus Was a B-Boy to strikingly different territories than Moulinexx does on his version. Their reworking follows in a more deep and atmospheric vein than the standard disco edit by Moulinexx. Some of the keywords in tracks like the Nagz one revolve around: broken future hip hop beats..More about kicks and snares, but still preserving ambient sound capes carefully entangling the beat structure with light hip hop flavour.

The closing track and opener of this compilaton is different angle of the Romanians Norzeatic & Khidja, more a collaboration than remix, adorned with MB’s pure, organic breathing sound. Waka and Qewza definitely have talent to rework the original tracks in a very smooth way, keep their previous qualities and take them somewhere else, to more ambient, but still pounding territories. 

by Andrej

Volkova Sisters are not only the characters from William Gibson’s cyberpunk novel Pattern Recognition, but also a Hungarian DIY band making dark waves with their second record Hope EP released a few days ago. The Hope EP’s five tracks are accompanied by a remix package from electronic producers some of whom you might be familiar with from this very blog.

For the gloomy lo-fi track ‘Das Mädel Und Die Dunkelheit’, the most experimental noise track on the EP, Poland’s Gazella, a new wave/ synthpop producer had a take, infusing it with some sunburnt chillwave vibes by taming the guitar theme. Bucharest-based producer Minus treated the guitar effect and added massive hip hop beats with a vocal tweak. But our favorite remix of the tune is the one by fellow Hungarian beatmaker Polyklinik who twisted the song and transformed it into a psychedelic experimentation layered of chopped vocals combined with odd noises, and drums with menacing bassline.

by András G. Varga