![]() ![]() With Farbwechsel, contrast can be a source of inspiration. And though there was a club scene when they were growing up, the sleeker, more polished iterations of the sound – “more regular techno,” laughs Alpár – have long been the norm. The record shop Deep has been a reliable importer of the drum and bass and techno which they started consuming in earlier years. They talk about how they’ve often found inspiration outside Budapest. Aside from SVR, who doesn’t produce, they share a one-take, lo-fi attitude to recording music, shaped by a preference for analogue synths. The city’s size means that events like Olbricht’s first show, where he and A i w A met, tend to see a lot of the same faces. Alpár and Norwell are childhood friends from the same village, Norwell met Imre when visiting London (while the latter was living there a few years ago), and the rest crossed paths at gigs in Budapest. ![]() Despite this awkward set-up, a close-knit atmosphere prevails. The founders – Norwell, Alpár, SVR and S Olbricht – are huddled around a laptop in Olbricht’s flat, alongside regulars Imre Kiss and A i w A. For the friends who remain at the label’s core, these connections add weight to their texturally-minded techno and place them in an interconnected global context. It’s found them releasing on and signing artists from a handful of labels dotted around Europe and North America. ![]() This shone a light on the individuals and their home territory, and kick-started connections with like-minded labels elsewhere. The three releases were from key Farbwechsel members, and releases elsewhere – on Opal Tapes for Olbricht and Nous for Route 8 – soon followed. It was music mediated by distortion, machine refrains buried in tape-hiss. A series of its early releases – 12-inches by S Olbricht, Route 8 and Imre Kiss – were tied together with early characteristics: submerged kick drums, coarse arpeggios in muddy textures. In 2014, London’s then-fledgling Lobster Theremin label brought the first major outside attention to Hungarian techno music, via the Farbwechsel label. With clubs and record shops slow to catch on, the formative, less tribal early years of dance music in Hungary were a second-hand experience for most. But despite Germany being a short train ride away, a nascent rave culture wasn’t quick to migrate across Hungary’s newly open borders in the way that it flooded into East Berlin. When the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, house and techno music were expanding into myriad strains of dance culture, and in pockets of the U.S. Though both Berlin and Budapest were on the eastern side of the Iron Curtain – the real and imagined border of post-World War II Europe, which divided Soviet-controlled states and the West – releasing electronic music is a different prospect in the Hungarian capital than in the German one. Over 20 years after Hungarian liberation, the effects of decades-long isolation still have a bearing on what they and other artists in Budapest do. For Budapest-based label Farbwechsel, Hungary’s 45-year Soviet occupation is a fact they grapple with as much as any of the country’s other cultural entities. There can be difficulties in building a creative culture after years of repression. ![]()
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