In the last years more and more Romanian artists are making their voice heard across the electronic music palette.

Romania is well known for the minimal/micro-house/Romanian-techno and tech-house music, but now we have artist that experiment and dive into other sounds, the kind of sounds we love at the Hipodrome of Music.

The first to turn heads last year was Borusiade aka Miruna Boruzescu. We know Miruna as a DJ for a long time, since she was living in Bucharest. She also helped organize and played at our only party in Berlin in 2011 with Mick Wills and #npnk.

In 2015 she joined the label Cómeme and from there her music started to get out attention. Jeopardy was her debut release on Cómeme.

In 2016 she had another release on France label Correspondant and on the new Romanian label P-Balans, about which we will talk later.

Another very interesting new project is The Holy Fix aka Camil Dumitrescu. He is also an old acquaintance of ours. He was one of the most active DJs from Bucharest’s underground scene and he played in 2009 at one of the parties we helped organize.

I haven’t heard of him since late 2012 until the Delusion Men project (collaboration with Ion Dumitrescu) appeared on Future Nuggets in 2015. Now this new project arouses and I’m happy to see him active once again.

As The Holy Fix, Camil has one track on the first release on the earlier recalled P-Balans (the above track) and is the author of the second P-Balans release called Tracks & Traps.

P-Balans is a sub-label of the fusion/electronica label from Bucharest, Future Nuggets, founded by Ion and Camil Dumitrescu. P-Balans started in mid 2016 and it’s set up as a techno label, for dance floor oriented music. The first three releases saw the light of day already and the fourth one is coming in April featuring Khidja, Delusion Men (aka Ion and Camil) and Borusiade.

As we are talking about Romanian labels I have to mention listen2me. I don’t have a lot of information about these guys (Șerb, mgch and Polochord), they appeared on my radar in the summer of 2015 after throwing a party in Bucharest with Max Ravitz.

The label is oriented towards more experimental/ambient/dub side of techno. In 2016 they had their 4th release featuring 4 original tracks from mgch and a remix by Șerb. Here is their bandcamp page.

The next producer from our list is called “the Romanian Detroit electro/techno pioneer” or “the Romanian Underground Resistance himself”.

The mystery man, Andrew Red Hand has been djing for the last 20 years and producing for 10 years already. He was more into the Detroit electro/techno sound and had some digital releases, but lately we can see a shift in his productions towards more warm and acid waters.

His debut vinyl release was in 2015 on Aroy’s Dee label M>O>S Recordings and 2017 saw already his second release on the label.

2016 proved to be a prolific year for Andrew as he had a second vinyl release on 1Ø Pills Mate and his DJ career seems to take off, with his Berlin (Tresor and Greissmuehle) and Bucharest (Kran) debut after 20 years.

Romansoff is a relatively new name on the Bucharest/Romania scene. It appeared at the beginning of 2013 together with his label Raw Tools, but the man behind the name, Tudor Gheorghe, is an older presence at Bucharest’s DJ booths. From 2008 to the Romansoff era, Tudor was known as Troe.

As a producer since 2013, Tudor is a constant deliverer of trustworthy muscle raw dance music. He has a serious number of releases under this belt for labels as Ruff Draft, Mörk, Bitter Moon and his own Raw Tools, but 2016 was his best year with debut releases on Signal Code and Crème Organization.

He also organized some good parties in Bucharest with people like Serge from Clone, Scott Grooves, Juniper, Gunnar Haslam, Christopher Rau or Lerosa. We also had the pleasure to invite him over for a party in 2014.

Barac Nicolae is one of the new faces of the almighty Romanian Sunrise Agency. Until 2012, Barac was half of NoiDoi (with Dubtil), a quite well known tech-house project, then he decided to extend his solo works and focus on more experimental & minimalistic sound.

His release on Rawax’ Aira Series is more duby and straightforward that the other productions he is doing.

Khidja, the duo composed of Andrei Rusu and Florentin Tudor, is known for its outernational affinities and dirty disco/electro they champion across the continent.

Since 2014, when they had the first release on [Emotional] Especial, their career took off. They have releases on Malka Tuti, Love On The Rocks, Bahnsteig 23 and are involved in the already mentioned P-Balans label. At the start of 2017 they released the first EP on John Talabot’s Hivern Discs label.

Last year they did two re-interpretations for the Dutch band Plus Instruments also on [Emotional] Especial.

After the Romanian proto-dance of 2005-2006, when the first Romanian producers entered the big league, with the releases of Mihai Popoviciu, Masstyk and The Model on International Deejay Gigolo Records, the first Romanian export in terms of electronic music was of course Cosmin TRG.

He started with drum & bass and then shifted to dubstep, finally by 2010 he found with place in the techno waters. In 2011, he had his first techno release on the 50Weapons label and there it stayed. In 2014, Cosmin lauched his Fizic label and soon EP number 6 will be released (from above mentioned Șerb).

Lately he engorged into more dark, dystopian and sometimes abrasive soundscapes, but in 2016 Cosmin started a new label called Sportiv focusing more on to the dance floor. The first release was out in November (the second release is coming from Romansoff).

In the last years, the tech-house scene started to fade out in Romania, but the minimal house is stronger than ever. Luckily there are some people that are also into other kind of electronic dance music and more and more artists contribute to our little scene. Party wise, there are now more promoters who are willing to take risks and invite artists that we like. So things are looking bright!

There is a room for everybody!

PS: this article is about Romanian producers. There are also a lot of good Romanian DJs I love. About them maybe in another article.

PPS: here is a playlist I made for 716 Music back in 2014 only with Romanian producers.