What must it feel like watching a party from the sidelines with little chance of taking part? Try moving to an impoverished part of the former USSR, swapping your passport for local papers and getting into production to find out. For many of the region’s ghost producers, dance music’s big time is a distant dreamland. Unobtainable, but frustratingly and fleetingly tangible from afar.

The visas that enable travel across borders – visas that are essential to a career in dance music – are prohibitively expensive. But there is a way to make a living from production without leaving the country. The only snag is it involves making tracks for other people in the West, and watching the careers of those with more fortunate passports rise through the ranks.

Ghostwriting is an incredibly controversial subject in dance music. Far more artists than most care to admit pay producers to write tracks for them, which they later pass off as entirely their own. It is a career treated with disdain in many circles, and a feverishly hot topic that many artists go to great lengths to cover up.

“There have always been bands, acts, and partnerships where someone preferred the technicalities of recording, mixing, and musical equipment, and the other preferred to be more involved in direction and arrangement,” says top ghostwriter and engineer Austin Leeds. “I think ghostwriting does need to be re-labelled in many instances, because really it is co-production. Even if a DJ just gives a style or a reference track, they are still curating, creating, and co-producing.”

For many ghost producers in the former Soviet states, there is nothing to debate. The chance to earn money from what would otherwise be a hobby, renders any qualms about making tracks for other people irrelevant.