Already in the second quarter of the year, the time it’s well passed to have a look back at what happened in terms of music production by Romanian artist in last year and what to expect in 2023.
2022 was pretty dry and chill year for the Romanian producers, with not many impressing achievements. We are still revolving around the same few figures, with very little coming forward besides the rominimal scene, but 2023 is looking more promising.
Eduard Costea aka DYL is a Romania-based (born in Deva & living in Cluj-Napoca) experimental producer. He lands on Nous’klaer with Fjord: a deep dive that starts out soothing and gets deceptively heavy and hypnotic as you swim further offshore – filled with immense echoes that can feel eerie and comforting all at once.
2020 was a tough year for almost everyone and definitely a year to forget for our scene. Events and gigs canceled, venues closed, artists lacking a way to earn a decent living and club culture facing a threat like never before. Without the interaction on the dancefloor all this seems pointless, but we have to stay resilient and hope for the better.
Looking at the local scene in Romania, during these times of hardship with movement restriction and curfew for almost the entire part of the year, with people fears and anxiety, there was almost to nothing happening in terms of events. But, the Romanian artists proved to be fairly active in the studio. We have here a summary of releases from Romanian artists that caught our attention in 2020 and a sneakpeek in what’s to come in the first part of 2021.
DYL+ DB1 successfully fuses experimental D&B, half-step and techno tropes. Here they re-establish their occasional studio partnership with a first collaborative full-length. It’s a pleasingly atmospheric and imaginative affair, with the pair offering up tracks that variously mix and match elements of unearthly ambient, off-kilter drum and bass, broken techno, murky post-dubstep rhythms, experimental electronica, the metallic clonk of industrial and the hazy hypnotism of dub techno. Musically it’s hard to pin down due to the wide variety of interestingly programmed rhythms, though the album’s uniformly paranoid sense of impending darkness, coupled with occasional glimpses of musical positivity, ensures a coherent aural vision.
Uniformity of Nature, the second release on Prague based Detach Recordings, marks an exciting collaboration between Romanian producer DYL, Senking from Raster/Noton and DB1 from Hidden Hawaii. DYL pushes the bounderies of his sound beyond his 170 roots, with the powerful electronics of ‘Phrases’ and the electrifying team-up with Senking on ‘Destroyed City Lights’. Two tracks see DYL in the more familiar peripheries of D&B. The percussive ‘Words’, with its curious background atmospherics, and the driving, hypnotic collaboration with DB1 on the title track ‘Uniformity of Nature’. ‘Launch’ sees Senking slow the tempo down and delve into a more murky space, yet still highly-charged with razor-sharp sound design. DYL closes the EP with the abstract ‘Semantics’, a further excursion into experimental electronics.
The last few years were quite good for the electronic music world and again in 2019 there was a lot a quality music coming out and revitalization of electro, broken beat, new beat and EBM continued. Looking at the situation locally, unfortunately 2019 feels like a step back for the Romanian scene after three years of growth and development. The three pillars of the Romanian electronic music are the same Borusiade, Cosmin TRG and Khidja and very little besides them.
“Sonder” is DYL’s second album, the first on vinyl and features 6 dark ambient tracks. This album is an open-ended story, which is edgy, dystopic and often disharmonic while progressing sonically throughout.
The ninth release on the Alpha Cutauri drum & space excursions comes from the Romanian artist DYL.
The Hipodrome Of Music 