There is a saying in Hungary, ‘Fiatalság bolondság’ – youth is folly.
Young people take risks. We jump into life with reckless abandonment, no consideration of convention or consequence. Being young is about getting lost in the feeling of the moment, not caring about what the future holds, or what it doesn’t . There is nothing that celebrates the carelessness of youth more than music, it provides the backing track for our journey along the road of self-discovery. It is the sound of the reckless. In Hungary they play it loud. A disenfranchised community has found its own voice and it echoes through the underground streets of Budapest.
Young people have learnt how to live along the margins of society, here they flourish, freed from the confines of mainstream culture. In this place the underground blooms, growing out of secret basements in industrial zones, travelling through the walls of old tenements into the courtyards below. A generation who was forced to feel invisible now embraces what is left unseen, finding comfort among the weeds. On my fourth night in Budapest, I was shown around this sonic garden by a couple who have witnessed it grow. Promoters of the underground, they told me about the subterranean world and invited me to enter.
I’m currently backpacking around Europe and the way I travel is through music, sound waves guiding me around the alleys of foreign cities. Whenever I come to a new place the first guide I check is Resident Adviser. For anyone who worships electronic music RA is their holy bible. Hidden within its digital pages are testaments of good places with decent people and great DJs. As a community platform it priorities the local scene, providing recommendations based on where the residents go. There was an event on Friday that caught my eye. MAFKARA , A warehouse party, carnival themed, secret location, costumes mandatory. I bought a ticket before even buying groceries for that upcoming week, excited to dive straight into the Budapest night scene. Music would provide my nourishment.
Farsang is a Hungarian carnival celebrated over the month of February, ending just before Lent. During this time people scare away the winter and encourage spring to blossom. Busós dress up in shaggy coats of sheep’s skin, the ensemble complimented by hand made wooden masks and winding horns. Towns have noisy parades filled with music and dance to ward off the evil spirits of winters past. MAFKARA represented a youthful reclamation of what is an ancient tradition, instead of folk music they played music from the underground.
I had a ticket but no invitation. In my excitement I forgot to consider how I was going to find the place . After a Facebook deep dive I managed to get in contact with the DJ who was headlining and a few hours later had access to the secret location. MAFKARA was at a venue called ‘factory’ , listed on google as a furniture shop in Budapest, the only thing being made here were sonic waves. Hidden in the basement of a 150 year-old-hosiery factory you had to walk down a flight of stairs until you found an inconspicuous black door, the only thing giving away the secret world hidden behind was the feeling of techno pulsating through the cracked concrete under your feet.
All events here are private, entry only possible through an invitation. People who criticise these places for being ‘elitest’ do not understand how their very foundations make them anti-establishment. The underground was created as a rejection of mainstream commercialism, it values music over profit, trading in the currency of community not cash. This threatens the commodified scene that we are watching take over major cities. Budapest has just been named one of the best party capitals in Europe. Ruin bars that were once a part of the cities subversive scene have become overrun by visitors ‘living for the weekend’, tourists who couldn’t tell you the difference between house and techno because they simply don’t care. It is difficult to find someone who comes to these establishments for the music. Ruin bars are often massive but walking through them I felt claustrophobic, the now repaired brick walls seem to fall in on themselves, trapping you amongst a heaving mass of people who were there but didn’t really seem present. I had people run into me , spill overpriced drinks on my shoes, knock cigarettes out of my hand. It was impossible to feel comfortable because you weren’t given room to properly breathe.
Despite factory’s reputation as the cities smallest underground club, it provided enough space for you to move. After entering through the discreet black door, you could bask in the sweet sound of minimal techno – the pulse of the underground. Minimal is known for its ‘less is more’ approach that gives different frequencies the space to breathe, pioneered by Robert Hood in the 90s he describes it as;
‘the basic stripped down, raw sound. Just drums, basslines and funky grooves and only what’s essential. Only what is essential to make people move. I started to look at it as a science, the art of making people move their butts, speaking to their heart, mind and soul’1
Like the genre, this club was understated yet impactful. One main room with a small bar tucked to the side that was mainly stocked with Jägermeister. All attention was directed towards the beats bouncing from the speakers, eyes towards the DJ who was constructing them into music . As described by Hood in an interview with the Red Bull Music Academy2 the whole idea of minimalism is to make layers of rhythm, like a Matryoshka doll they stack upwards, creating hidden pockets of noise. What starts out as a simple track builds itself through samples of sound, creating rhythmic patterns that are almost meditative, hypnotically drawing you in. In factory the trance like atmosphere was enhanced by a crowd of magical beings. Elves decorated with flower crowns, a woman who had transformed into a butterfly, ethereal witches who blended into the black walls. People concealed behind masks dancing through the night with hopes that daylight would bring a sign of spring.
A DJs ability to strip a track back to its foundations and then gradually rebuild it is a very intimate process, one that inspires closeness within the crowd. There was an immediate kinship I felt with the people in this place. Having a curated space means that everyone is on the same wavelength, united by the common purist of good music. In a Facebook post from 2024 factory announce that: ‘As you know, the club is returning to its roots—moving forward, all events will be private and entry will only be possible with an invitation. We aim to maintain the warm, family-like atmosphere and the unique vibe we’ve created’.
You can see the parallels between Budapest and the birth of the minimal genre in Detroit. In America during the late 1990s the rave scene had sprung out from the underground and was suddenly exposed for the world to see. Unfortunately it quickly became co-opted by the same capitalist forces it had constructed itself against. The increasing tempos were moving further away from the genre’s soul. Hood reflets on this period in Detroit’s musical history ‘It was becoming so commercial and so watered down, that I wanted to take it back to its essence’3 .He set out on a project to expose the core of electronic music in a way that it becomes enhanced by its minimalism.
The repetition found in minimal techno has the effect of uniting dancers through a common beat, creating a diverse group ruled by a single pulse. In many ways it inspires introspection, you often loose yourself to the groove dissociating from everything but your immediate surroundings. As I moved to the groove I started dancing with a guy adorned in dreadlocks spinning a luminescent devil stick in the middle of the crowd. He let me have a turn but after a few attempts I returned it to the more competent of us. ‘Where are you from’ he asked, Australia! I replied, ‘Austria?’ no no Australia and jumped around like a kangaroo. ‘Ah I see, how did you find this place ?’, I explained my Resident Adviser deep dive. He was impressed. ‘You know it’s very underground here’. He wasn’t just referring to factory’s basement location, I was starting to realise that I had stumbled across a strain of Budapest’s underground scene, I wondered if I followed it what more I could unravel.
In his essay Digital Discipline: Minimalism in House and Techno Philip Sherburne suggests that minimal techno has its roots in the works of pioneers such as Kraftwerk and Detroit Techno’s Derrick May and Juan Atkins. However, he also acknowledges that it was largely inspired by the polyrhythms found in the African musical tradition, its emphasis on groove and repetition contrasting the western fascination with melody and linear progression4. There is something that feels radical about minimalism, maybe it is the hypnotic effect of stripping something down to its essence, or maybe it has to do with the history of the genre, its origins as the music of the defiant bleeding into its modern-day chapter, a chapter I was witnessing unfold in Budapest.
Robert Hood explains his production style ‘It’s not like I was setting out to make a minimal project. It was just that this is how I felt, this is what moved me. And so I felt that, quite possibly, if it moved me it could maybe move other people.’3 By 3am most people were moving. Letting the melodic waves of minimal role over them. The headlining DJ had just started playing his set, fitted with a duffman suit that had ‘beer’ written on the front of it, he seemed ready to party. I drifted around the floor dancing with different groups of people. I got talking to a guy wearing a prisoner outfit who had travelled over an hour to attend the event. I noticed that his friends were endowed with butterfly related paraphernalia yet he was without so I gave him my butterfly crown. In exchange he bought me a beer and his friends invited me outside for a j. After exchanging cultural knowledge about what we call the end of a j – ‘stinging rodger’ in Australia, ‘Bishop’ in Hungary, We started talking about the DJ who was currently playing, Andrija Jäger. ‘you know he owns the club’ one of the friends said. I realised now why the bar was mainly stocked with Jägermeister. ‘he is probably the best minimal DJ in the country’. I realised why the club was so cherished. Once an illegal venue, it is probably one of the only places in Budapest that still deserves the label ‘underground’, the embodiment of a space made by music lovers for music lovers. It seemed fitting that a pioneer of Budapest’s underground scene was recognised for a genre of music known for its ‘less is more’ approach. It was magic how he could conjure so much from so little.
In 2009 Andrija founded MAF. M for minimal, the style of music. A for art, because music is art. F for family, which comes from an understanding that the people who attend their events aren’t just friends but family. Initially concerned with creating club nights the organisation has grown to include its own TV channel , DJ school , rehearsal room. Its goal is to ‘raise the standard of cultural life, introduce, promote, and familiarize its artists, and bring the community together’. The underground couldn’t sustain itself without the people who feed it. DJs and audiences alike, factory provides a place where they can nourish themselves with good music, music made for real life people not their algorithmic self. Mainstream music is almost formulaic, sacrificing quality for mass appeal. These days it is becoming easier to distil genres down to what is proven to be liked by most people. Music from the underground maintains its originality, representing a pure form of creative expression that is becoming harder to find. Places like factory hide themselves from the surface level, from people who trivialise music and don’t appreciate its power to move people. I was moving all night, I couldn’t stop, infected by the contagious energy of the place and the freedom it allowed. My only break was the occasional cigarette in the smokers.
I’ve started trying to thank the DJ after their set. As a purveyor of fine art it’s important to appreciate the creator of the piece , DJs often don’t get the recognition they deserve for the time that goes into creating these soundscapes. So, when I saw one of the DJs come into the smoking area with his partner I went and said hello. Your set was great, thank you! ‘oh that’s very kind of you’. They spoke some English and I spoke no Hungarian but we managed to create a great conversation.
Oli was the DJ. An IT consultant for a big pharmaceutical company by day, and a techno head by Night, Liv had studied horticultural engineering at university and was a fellow music lover. Like minimal they challenged your expectations, making me curious to find out more. ‘Oli is really good, he does authentic techno, I love his music’. In the hallowed-out scene of Budapest’s nightlife minimal techno has retained its soul, and these two people are the soul searchers. Together they run ᴓPUS, a type of event cooperative that Liv manages and Oli plays at .On their fakebook page they break down the meaning of ᴓPUS; a ‘composed work’, of ‘musical work’, also known as an ‘artistic creation’. A sound collage of sorts, made up of different pieces that produce an aesthetic result. Liv complimented my costume calling me ‘piroska’ which is the Hungarian name for little red ridding hood. At one-point she grabbed my hand excitedly and said ‘I don’t know if it’s the e but I understand you well’. I think she was referring to my pronunciation while alluding to something deeper. Music is the universal language, allowing people from other sides of the world to connect. Liv describes MAF as ‘not a group of people’ but ‘a family’, factory being their home. They warmly welcomed me in. We exchanged numbers and made plans to get coffee sometime soon, I would help them practice their English and they would show me underground Budapest.
I went back inside to the enchanted forest floor, where beings were still gathered around performing a timeless ritual. Dance. I noticed that a women dressed as a nurse was now wearing my butterfly crown, it had made its way through the night, just like me. At one point these two laddies started handing out bottles of Champaigne to anyone who wanted a sip from the shared chalice. Around 7am I ran into my dreadlocked friend again, if you ever want a party buddy let me know I told him. ‘This is my last party, I’m having a son !’ He said, smiling while spinning the devil stick high up into the air. The underground welcomes all types , it is as diverse as its music, full of people who don’t fit in elsewhere but come to places like factory to belong. If you are a decent person who likes good music, music that pushes boundaries and challenges trends, you will be invited into places where you can pursue the subversive, surrounded by people just like you.
At 8am I decided it was time to leave. I had work in one hour and no idea how I was going to get back to the city without a working phone. I said goodbye to my fellow creatures of the night and as I exited noticed someone had left my crown by the door, still intact with only one of the butterflies missing, I put it on my head triumphantly. A princess leaving the ball. As I danced down the road to find my chariot home I couldn’t stop smiling. Maybe it was because of the e or maybe it was from all the magic I had seen that night.
The minimal nation is rising again, growing out from the underground, It is a reckless revolution of movement, just like the people who listen and dance to it.
REFERENCES
- Museum of contemporary art Chicago, 2024 <https://visit.mcachicago.org/events/talk-on-techno-and-art-robert-hood-arthur-jafa-deforrest-brown-jr/>
- Red Bull music academy, Dec 2 2014, Viewed 14/2/25 <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B0L_owZu-9Q>
- Cardew, Ben 2024, DJmag < https://djmag.com/features/how-robert-hoods-minimal-nation-became-defining-work-minimal-techno>
- Sherburne, Phillip 2004, ‘Digital Discipline: Minimalism in House and Techno’ in Christoph Cox and Daniel Warner, Audio Culture: Readings In Modern Music. < https://happen.company/wp-content/uploads/2022/12/Digital_discipline-1.pdf>
