A round-up of what is likely the last relevant electronic music-wise relevant rural town in Hungary. We spoke to Balázs Kovács, Roland Nagy and Tamás Hámori about the Electronic Music Media Arts BA/BSc course, new music experiments, club music, venues and organiser forces.
Published December, 2024
It’s quite cold in Istanbul now, reports Ece Özel at the start of our Zoom call. It’s 12 degrees, but that’s just the beginning, the real winter is yet to come, including snow.
Published December, 2024
An overview of the Farbwechsel label, looking back at its story so far and mapping out what’s coming up next.Farbwechsel was founded in 2012, injecting a new burst of colour to the Hungarian electronic music scene with their signature blend of ominous downtempo, the crackle of sizzling cassette tapes, gritty ambient textures, and introspective house releases.
Published December, 2024
We continue our collaboration with the Oramics collective, focusing on the north Polish collective DEKONSTRUKT. Here you can read an interview by Zosia Holubowska with KAROLINDA, a musical project by a queer interdisciplinary artist Karo Linda, who is fascinated by bass, strong beat, and skittering rhythms.
Published May, 2024
Between Lučenec and Banská Štiavnica, Jakub Juhás, founder of the mappa label, forms soundscapes that naturally wander between the real and the fictional. Be it sonic ecosystems of ponds or eclectic electronics drowned in the meditative sound of organs.
Published May, 2024
In talks with (Működésben in Hungarian) is a new series started out on MMN Magazine, that features interviews with notable figures of the local Hungarian and international electronic music scene. The focus of the interviews is on artistic practices and creative methods, but of course, each interview touches upon other topics too, may that be a more specific or a general one, including past events or future plans.
Published March, 2024
Amen Tma is a project of Danky & Acidmilk. The ideas, sounds, atmospheres and thought processes on the album Insect Phonetics Research had been growing for three years.
Published November, 2014
Last week, we brought out our fifth release on the Baba Vanga imprint. And similarly to the previous releases on the label, the decision to release it came very quickly.
Published April, 2014
It may seem ironic. Finding a Bulgarian producer can be an easier task if you choose to look outside, rather than within the borders of our country.
Published March, 2013
Listening to the Slovak producer Stratasoul is like a hot air balloon ride – floating and sinking into a magic aural stratosphere, bumping into a chunk of beats here, catching on a string of clinks and clanks there…so easy and carefree. “I remember feeling fascinated when I first heared a sampled amen loop on an Atari ST computer,a gift from granddad.
Published January, 2013
Budapest-based producer Balázs Semsei aka Norwell makes his debut with his psychedelic electronica project on Shabu Recordings. The Farbwechsel co-founder is the third man connected to the fledgling label we featured earlier.
Published January, 2013
New label alert. Plunderphonics is a new digital imprint established this year by the 18-year old Krystian Stebnicki.
Published September, 2012
Having three sides as painter, rapper and songwriter-poet Gazsi Rap Show aka Gáspár Szőke is one of those multi-facetted artists. Gathering attention of the DIY-art scene with his memorable live shows and visual aesthetics of trash art he is finishing now his first album Az Atom Utolsó Erkölcsös Vak Királya (in English: The Last Virtous Blind King Of The Atom).
Published June, 2012
Bedroom pop and lo-fi in Hungary has evolved to the next stage since early 2011. The first record label to cover this scene, Golf Team Records, was born a few days ago.
Published April, 2012
Route 8 has dropped his first EP Never Ending Stories just two months ago - we also featured his 4-track debut a while ago - and for now he’s working hard on his live set debut at the release party for the imminent second compilation of Easterndaze on 11th of May in Budapest’s Roham Bar. We’re eagerly looking forward to seeing his ‘synthpop-house’ tunes live.
Published April, 2012
mangulicaFM is no stranger to easterndaze’s ears. The Belgrade producer, who currently lives in cold cold Hamburg, played at our party in September in Pancevo (Belgrade;).
Published April, 2012
Since a long time we have been following the music generated by the Romanian mash-up artist Bogdan Marcu going under the name of b0g. His sonic “plunderphonic mutants” are not only an exercise in mixing seemingly disparate sources into one bass-heavy and dirty piece of lo-fi booty electronica, but most often also conceptual pieces reflecting and reinterpreting Romanian culture, history and politrix.
Published March, 2012
Please Feed My Records is a collective of musicians, bedroom producers and DJs based in a sleepy town of Zielena Gora in Poland. In spite - or perhaps also because of - the soporific, bucolic surroundings, PFMR has gravitated towards the hazy sonic spectrum encompassing hypnagogia, synth-driven territories, glofi, shoegaze, cut up yearning R'n'B vocals, post/dance beats et al.
Published March, 2012
A new compilation put together by Nikola Vitkovic (as his independent endeavour) strives to highlight the buoyoant music scene of the troublesome period of Serbia’s history - the 1990s. It seems that the old maxim about art thriving in the age of general gloom is at play in this case as well.
Published January, 2012
Toni Dimitrov is a mainstay in the Macedonian independent scene. He’s been a part of the brilliant Kanal 103 radio station (which we gatecrashed in autumn, more on that soon) for astonishing 14 years.
Published January, 2012
Another of our yearly recaps this time with not one but two perspectives on the Slovak music scene. First Filip Drábek from the Exitab label, one of the most active imprints in Slovakia in terms of independent music at the moment and second one is a collective answer from the BWO collective, purveyors of urban dance music in the country.
Published January, 2012
Tom Wilson is a British Bucharest based journalist, BBC radio correspondent and DJ and one of our connections in the city while we were there on our exploration journey in 2010. What’s the highlight for you in Romania’s music scene?The highlight of my year had to be either the Rokolectiv festival or Romania’s continuing global take-over of the charts with Europop artists like Inna, Radio Killer and Alexandra Stan.
Published January, 2012
Vuksa Velickovic is a writer, UCL alumni, editor of the Bturn magazine focused on promoting the music, culture and style of the Balkans and a general man about town. Here he divulges what rocked his world in ‘11 and what has 2012 got in store for him.
Published January, 2012
Another of our 2011 recaps this time with acclaimed Czech journalist and writer Karel Veselý, author and editor of books including Hudba ohně (Fire Music: Radical Black Music From Jazz to Hip Hop and Beyond) and Kmeny. What’s the highlight for you in Czech Republic’s music scene?It’s nice to see people doing their own thing without the support from the big labels and also defying expectations from their fans.
Published January, 2012
The end of the year is nigh, and thus we have decided to - surprise, surprise - compile a list of Best of from the countries we have been exploring over the last two years. And since our knowledge is limited, we have asked those living, working and creating in those particular countries to tell us about the music happenings in their country.
Published December, 2011
One of our radio outputs apart from ocasional shows for Habitat.fm and even more sporadic production-in-the-making for Resonance FM is the weekly feature Vychodiska at the czech Radio Wave.
Published October, 2011
We have been in touch with Dana Dramowicz from the burgeoning Polish dubstep/bass label Concrete Cut almost from the label’s inception. Purveyors of electronic sounds oscillating around the 130-140bpm mark, Concrete Cut has released almost ten records in less than a year.
Published July, 2011
When we first heard Piresian Beach in the autumn of 2010, we were amazed by her fuzzed-out lo-fi sound incorporating elements of surf-rock, punk and rock'n'roll into her trademark seductive compositions. What began as a surprising discovery has also stricken a chord with the sensitivities of Hungarian youngsters using the microblogging platform tumblr.
Published June, 2011
The brand new imprint alice mange son coeur is a truly modern label. It operates from Prague and is run by the young Sara Cross who A&R’d the label roster from her bedroom via Last.
Published June, 2011
The Prague-based duo Reverend Dick has a penchant for second hand analogue synthetizers which they find in thrift stores and waste dumps. The two members of the project – Richard Bakeš and Daniel Vlček – are also visual artists and members of the activist art collective Groupe Guma Guar.
Published May, 2011
Some time ago, we have written about a documentary about Belgrade’s creative scene (check the article here). There is another movie about similar subject out there.
Published May, 2011
Producer Piotr Dabrowski is one of the most talented producers from the burgeoning Polish bass/dubstep/future garage scene. His music is decidedly deep and warm with killer bass enveloping his tunes.
Published April, 2011
Silviu Badea aka Montgomery Clunk is a Romanian beatmaker who arose from the Bucharest scene. With releases on Error Broadcast and the Russian hub Gimme5, the future looks bright for the 22-year old producer.
Published March, 2011
We met Gosia during our August trip to Warsaw. We have written about her musical endeavours a few times on this very blog, too - be it about her LeeDVD project, the more recent Fuka Lata psychedelic experimentations and her new label D2.
Published January, 2011
Batcha de Mental is a deranged musical alter ego of Slovak designer and musician Alex Gutrai. He will play live at the impending Easterndaze gig at Stanica in Žilina in Northern Slovakia on 10 December.
Published December, 2010
Anca Stirbacu is a young Romanian visual artist whose music project was born out of the need to complement her visual works with audio. Though experimenting with currently fashionable genres like witch house, she is planning to further expand her music project, so we are curious to see her future artistic development.
Published November, 2010
A hypnotic sonic detonation unleashes. Romania’s SOMNOROASE PĂSĂRELE is a project of Virgilius Mocanu and Elena Album, currently based in the seaside town Constanta in south-east Romania.
Published October, 2010
After spending half a day searching for a free place in local hostels we met with Mihaela Vasile who’s one of the promoters behind the seminal Romanian advanced electronica festival Rokolectiv. We talked about the local music scene, Romania, politics and corruption, about Bucharest being a really hostile city, about taxidrivers listening to minimal music or about legaly sold fake MDMA and the rise of the local drug scene.
Published July, 2010