Interesting article in Resident Advisor about my hometown :)

Month to Month: Romanian holiday

2007 saw three names—Raresh, Rhadoo and Petre Inspirescu—emerge as the brightest young things in minimal techno. Ronan Fitzgerald travels to Bucharest to track them down.

Dublin, 12.30pm. In a taxi on the way to the airport. The driver, a man of around 40, is playing a Seal live album. I tell him I'm going to Romania to write about dance music. "Them DJs earn a fucking packet don't they?" he says.

A little over twelve hours later and I’m in another taxi. Martin Landsky's "1000 Miles" blares. Noting our approval, and lacking the English to reply, the driver turns the volume up even louder. It's so loud that I almost want to ask him to turn it back down. The windows shake with the bass as the taxi speeds across the city, through chaotic junctions and endless roadworks, heading for Kristal Glam Club. On the car stereo, minimal sits side by side with commercial funky house. Welcome to Bucharest.

Kristal Glam Club

In Kristal, it's 3 a.m. A long rectangular room with eight or nine huge video screens and a lowered dancefloor is completely packed, perhaps even exceeding its 1000 person capacity. Raresh, the youngest of the three Romanians who run the Ar:pi:ar label, finishes his warm-up set. A raucous, rousing chant of "Ricardo, Ricardo" swells up before tonight's headliner, Villalobos, has even played a record. It lasts for a couple of minutes.

Villalobos's set is uncompromising, with just a few recognisable tracks (Bobby Konders, Radio Slave), yet the dancefloor is packed for the entire four hours, with huge cheers welling up at regular intervals. The most striking thing about the crowd is how young some of them are. Plenty look no older than sixteen. If that's too young to be doing drugs, nobody has bothered to tell them, at least judging by their pupils. After an hour or two, things get so wild that you realise you'd forgotten clubs were supposed to be like this. It's far less gentrified than clubbing elsewhere, like clubbing was five or six years ago.

At the bar I meet an Austrian who tells me he does contract work here in Bucharest and is living the high life on a salary from a better economy, even though Bucharest isn't as universally cheap as you might imagine (around two or three euros for a beer.) I ask him where he's going afterwards, making conversation, and he starts eulogising about a club. It takes me a few minutes to realise that he's referring to a strip club. I wander off.

Session Club

Come 7 a.m. Kristal closes, and the party moves on to the aptly named Session Club. Accessed through a bizarre stairwell that reminds me of trips to the dentist in the late 80s, Session Club shares the upstairs floor of a tiny, depressed-looking shopping complex with some offices. It's one of the oddest locations for a club imaginable.

The club itself consists of one large square room with the decks raised up a few steps at the front. It's not glamorous, though few places are at 7 a.m., nor would you want them to be. Here we finally get a chance to see the trio who are the reason for this visit, three close friends called Rhadoo, Raresh, and Pedro (Petre Inspirescu), who suddenly this year have become three of the most popular names in minimal. I meet them briefly on the way in. Raresh, who visibly loves every minute of his current success, greets me with a warm shout of "Resident Advisor!"

Average age of the minimal crowd at Kristal Glam: 16?
Photo credit: Catalin Tudorica / fotoclubbing.ro

After weeks of wrangling and attempts to set a time and date to speak to the three founders of Ar:pi:ar Records, I see my chance and make an arrangement to interview them here at Session Club on Monday. Though it already seems an unlikely arrangement, it's better than nothing. Rhadoo, Raresh and Pedro then take turns DJing as the dingy club rapidly fills up. It must hold around 700 people or so. Ricardo Villalobos eventually arrives and joins in too. A whole other party is just beginning, this time with a crowd that seems a little older. The Romanians play deep techno and house - just what you'd expect given the lush spaced out tones of the two Ar:pi:ar releases.

We leave around 8.30 a.m. to get some rest.

Loggia

That evening in Loggia, a small bar with good house and techno DJs and frequent guests (though not of the five figure fee variety, as my booking the night before attests), locals tell us that the party is still going at Session Club. It's now 22.00. One clubber claims that as the afternoon drew in, the DJs began to turn the levels and effects on the mixer to extreme positions, as whatever crowd was left lurched around in time to increasingly weird sounds.

But not everyone is down with the success of Ar:pi:ar. One local, Sergiu, introduces himself and then immediately complains about the 5/5 score I gave to Petre Inspirescu's Cadenza single on RA. It's not the first or last time that a local will wonder what the big deal about Pedro, Rhadoo, and Raresh is. Plenty of the Romanians I speak to are bored by the increasing popularity of "minimal", and wonder if Villalobos and Luciano water down their sets when they DJ here. It's an argument I've heard in Dublin numerous times in the past, though I can't help but feel it's some sort of inferiority complex. Sergiu promises to show us the other side of Bucharest, but first we hear that the Villalobos party has moved to a small apartment not far from Loggia.

After party

We travel with locals this time and get out of the taxi in a dark alley. Like most places in Bucharest, there are cars parked everywhere at insane incongruous angles, adding to the air of madness that the city's bizarre planning gives off. On some streets, you might see a huge five star hotel next to a smashed up house and a McDonalds. We make our way past the jungle of cars and down the street to a large block of flats. The international language of bass tells us the party is nearby.

Inside the flat, the embers of the night are just faintly glowing. Two DJs squat on the floor with decks at their feet. Ricardo Villalobos is asleep on the couch with his scarf over his head. Raresh buzzes around chatting to friends. I finally meet the man known only to me as "Cata", whose Sunrise promotion company books all the Villalobos and Luciano shows in Romania. He has played a significant part in building the duo's huge popularity here.

Over the last two months, he has been arranging interviews for me, though it hasn't been easy. He calls me a "fixiste", which is the Romanian for "pedant". As a lifelong fixiste, I'm happy to learn a new word. I can't tell if he's joking, actually aggressive, or just drunk. I don't bother arguing with him for two reasons: firstly because I'm still banking on interviewing his three artists in around seven hours, and secondly because he resembles a WWF wrestler, complete with pony tail. Perhaps he's fine when you get to know him. Or perhaps, with a slew of hit singles this year, and lots of word of mouth, he feels his acts don't need any publicity.

After a while, Villalobos wakes up and chats to a few people. He tells me he loves it here and talks about how special it is. Then a short time later he leaves, in a flurry of effusive goodbyes. Weirdly, the party seems to die down a little afterwards, leading you to wonder if a famous DJ being asleep on a couch adds something to a room's atmosphere at 5am, and if so, why? It seems further evidence that Villalobos and Bucharest are in the middle of a serious love affair. Ricardo is like a patron for the scene here: He has adopted the three Ar:pi:ar artists as protégés – all throughout his set at Kristal he was embracing Raresh warmly. It seems clear that Ricardo is almost as much a part of the scene here as the natives.

Month to Month: Best of R, P & R

1. Petre Inspirescu - Sakadat [Vinyl Club]
Surely the most memorable snare of 2007, and indeed of most other years, this track is Pedro at his distinctive best.
2. Saint Germain - Rose Rouge (Tak Su Mix Rhadoo Edit) [White]
Nobody claims responsibility for this, but reliable sources tell us that it is in fact Rhadoo. Remixing a classic is never easy, but his understated dub managed to give the original a new twist, not to mention generated a few hundred "ID this remix" posts on the internet.
3. Rhadoo - Going Like You [Ar:pi:ar]
One of several Romanian records from 2007 that makes you stretch to find a comparison point. This is a new face for deep techno.
4. Petre Inspirescu - La Creme Bonjour [Cadenza]
Jazzy and housey but with melodies that are entirely unlike those we've come to expect in either genre. Just one track on one of the year's finest EPs.
5. Petre Inspirescu - De Bou [Ar:pi:ar]
-If you think you don't know this one, you may be wrong. All year the deep atmospheric tones of ‘De Bou’ were used in mixes by all sorts of different DJs. It's a track that's loaded with character.
Cosmic techno in a UR style, with jazzy melodies and a raw beat.

Luciano too is popular. He's recently toured Romania extensively, playing in tiny venues in that locals tell me are real backwaters. One clubber says that Luciano is practically a "national hero" because of this. When he or Villalobos play here, it's a huge event, and a few locals tell me the frenzied atmosphere in Kristal is reserved for these visits. Similarly, I'm told the party goes on even longer on these weekends, as I note it's now 24 hours since Villalobos finished his set at Kristal.

No shows?

Monday lunchtime, and we're waiting at Session Club to interview Pedro, Rhadoo, and Raresh. There's nobody there, except for the office workers resuming their week, who look at us with suspicion. I check my phone, and there is bad news: the interview has been rescheduled. We spend the rest of the day wandering around the city, killing time.

When we return, this time the club is open. It's still completely filthy from the weekend. A gigantic mountain of bottles has been collected in the middle of the dancefloor, as the cleanup is about to begin. Like most nightclubs, in the day it has little or no allure. It also has no Rhadoo, Raresh, or Pedro. The thought of having to do a phone interview after I get back home despite traveling 1500 miles to get here is now very real. But after a few phonecalls, I speak to Rhadoo who apologises and assures me they will meet me the next day at 13.00. All I can say is that that's fine.

Web Club

That night we go to Web Club, one of the first clubs in Bucharest, according to some locals. After Kristal, you could easily draw the conclusion that electronic music was new here, or that Romania was experiencing its first wave of dance culture, but you'd be wrong. Dance music has been a presence here for a long time. What's new is so called minimal and the enthusiasm for that. On the flipside you have clubs like Web, which have been here for years and which play literally anything but minimal.

The walls of Web Club are covered in graffiti ("I hate liberalism") and two huge murals with Britney and Christina Aguilera lyrics placed over bizarre images. The DJs play 80s hits, weird acid techno, hiphop, and anything in between, MCing over the tracks at will. It's a manic party of a different kind, with just 30 or so people there. "This is the real Bucharest" Sergiu tells me, though it's all been pretty real so far for me. Like a lot of things that define themselves by authenticity, Web Club is soon to be closed down.

Pedro, Rhadoo, and Raresh

The next day we check out of our hotel and go to meet Ar:pi:ar (phonetically R:P:R, the initials of Rhadoo, Pedro and Raresh.) After weeks of emails and a weekend with two cancelled interviews, finally the trio are here. Rhadoo does most of the talking, and seems to have thought about the fact that these three artists are currently some of the most talked about people in dance music. Raresh is friendly and enthusiastic, and Pedro remains relatively silent for most of the interview, though he is polite.

Guarded would be too strong a word, but all three are certainly careful not to say too much. Tired from the long weekend, you get the sense they don’t want to give off the wrong impression. I ask why the atmosphere at clubs in Romania is so intense. "You have memories about clubbing in the 80s or 90s and everything else," says Rhadoo. "Here this doesn't exist as that mass phenomenon, because it didn't happen. We have a gap of ten or fifteen years in terms of our musical history. So people are jumping on board and are more enthusiastic."

Do they worry about local resentment at their success in a small city like Bucharest? In four days I’ve met plenty of it. All three say they try not to think about other people's opinions either way. "As long as we are sincere with ourselves and doing what we care about most, we don't care what people say,” says Raresh. “That should be the way it is in everything you do in life. If you are true to yourself, then fuck the rest".

I ask them how they feel about the current wave of enthusiasm for their music. Raresh: "I keep on hearing about this success but I know that there is so much more to learn after this. What is happening right now is only one step. And in my opinion we have to concentrate more and more all the time, and to be better.”

We talk for half an hour or so, and the trio are pretty down to earth, so much so that I don’t think that it has even occurred to them that maybe one of the next steps they’ll have to face is dealing with the media. I can't help but feel that the interview doesn’t matter a great deal to them. Perhaps they feel there’s already hype enough around their music, and they aren’t willing to fan the flames. In 2007, Raresh has played the Love Parade and is now on Cocoon's DJ agency. Rhadoo is strongly linked to one of the biggest white labels for years with a remix of Saint Germain's "Rose Rouge" (which he refuses to confirm or deny he is responsible for). And Pedro's releases speak for themselves.

It’s time to go. The trio thank me warmly, tell me I have to come back to Bucharest on Labour Day because the parties are always crazy, and leave. I stop the tape. I can't be sure if I'll make it to Bucharest in May, but even if I don't, I get the feeling I'll catch up with them soon, with this Romanian techno bound to keep moving west.