A student's suggestion for a DIY micro-scene of the 21st Century - Rominimal (Romanian minimal techno)
When I heard it, I thought this is a bit son-of-Villalobos and apparently he is the foundation stone of this sound.
Which is a bit of a for-discerning-types-only scene, I'm told - sophisticated. They drink wine on the dancefloor!
I'd never heard of this sound but the scene has had a smidgeon of attention from the electronic dance media.
As a child I had a phase of being really interested in Romania, or Rumania as it was often rendered then. But for other reasons - I believe it had and still has the largest area of wild forest in Europe and as a result a lot of cool animals (see I was into the idea of being a naturalist when I grew up - my other big obsession as a country was Canada, for similar reasons). Then a bit later I got really into the legend of Vlad the Impaler and did a school project, with the grisly bits penned in red Indian ink. Somewhere in the middle of that, I had a phase of wanting to go on a cruise - and one of the more intriguing ones you would see in the back of colour supplements and the TV Times and Radio Times was a Black Sea cruise that stopped off in Romania. And in our house, we were fans of Ilie Năstase, the literally dashing tennis player with an exciting style of net playing who brightened Wimbledon at a time when remorseless speed machines and baseline playing was starting to dominate. Got a faint memory that he might have soured in his old age, politically speaking, but I could be wrong.
Grown up interests related to that country: the philosopher E.M. Cioran (Oneohtrix Point Never's favorite), who extracted darkly witty aphoristic gems from his melancholy view of the world, a sort of post-Nietzsche Morrissey. There's a lot of cool electronic composers also from that country.
But I am unfamiliar with the popular music of that part of the world, or indeed the underground dance music.
Interesting thing I learned recently - Romanian is not a Slavic language as you'd expect with the Balkans, but a mutant form of Italian (Perhaps that's why it's called Romania - they speak Roman)
My own interest in Romania has always centered around the hideous but compelling monstrosity that is the Palace of the Parliament, which has a lot of "world's largest" declarations, and is often described as one of the few man-made structures one can see from space (though I'm not sure that's actually true.) On a related note, there's "Blues for Ceausescu" by Fatima Mansions, nihilistic jam with a stadium chorus.
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