When music producer Silviu Badea was six years old and living in a small town in the mountains, his father—who was from Bucharest—had friends that were into music and would smuggle restricted releases into the country. He remembers being allowed to take his pick from a neighbor's batch of audio cassettes: "The big deal was with rock then. I chose Mayhem Live in Leipzig and Sepultura's Roots. The covers were hand-drawn—they tried to make them look like the originals. That was it for me." After a spell building hip-hop-influenced beats under a different name, Badea now gets his musical highs making techno that sounds like it was just unearthed on an archeological dig. Frayed and crumbling, it rumbles on all the same with a purposefulness that can't help feeling poignant. "Like all the people I know, I try to survive, earn enough to live decently, and try not to lose my mind," says Badea. "All these things that make you normal in these dark ages."

On working in Bucharest: "Bucharest…I don't really know to be honest. It's a lot of pressure here, or this is how I perceive it. When I was a youngster I never left my neighborhood, and I had this nice group of people without pretentions and all that crap. It was good. I got older, started to think a bit more, all my friends from here went away—I think there's only three of us living here now. We see each other rarely. The annoying thing is that all the shit is happening in Bucharest and in Cluj, maybe Timisoara, but besides that we're 20 years behind on everything you could possibly think of. Even in Bucharest, it's like that occasionally. It is inspiring in the sense that the struggle I have to put here to have a decent living for me and my family fills me up with life in the end. Sometimes I just wish to burn it all. Sometimes I love it. There's these small corners—like behind the block where I live, there's this light for the parking. I stare at it and I like Bucharest then. It's weird, actually. I can't decide if I hate or love it here."

ANTI by C L N K

On a career-defining moment: "I was 18, I think. I met these cool guys in a city not far from Bucharest. It's called Craiova. They were into music a lot, producing and all that. I was fooling around too. One of them—my friend Alex, who's making music as MGCH now—had an E-MU 0202 to sell. I went there to buy it and I left with that, a bunch of friends and a ton of pirated music. I decided I wanted to make music full-time. It didn't turn out quite like that. I did it for a while, [but] now I have a normal job. I work in Control Club as a lighting engineer and stage technician etc. That also affected the "career."

On what's next for him: "Right now I'm working on an LP. I won't say what it is yet. It's noisy and it's gonna come out on Listen2me (or my own label that is going to be on pretty soon). Besides that, I'm talking with the guys from Error Broadcast for a new vinyl this year. That's basically all right now.