"It's just like Berlin in the 1990s" is a thing that people who have not actually been to Berlin in the 1990s about whatever Eastern European city they have just visited for a long weekend. It is the kind of well-meant statement that exposes a rather bleak truth about the German capital's near-hegemony on the world's subcultural and especially clubcultural life. In this way, it not only shapes the perception of those from the city going to other places, but has also led to Berlin being accepted as the ultimate benchmark for electronic music culture elsewhere.
This is why I felt incredibly stupid when boarding a plane to Budapest some time last fall. Booked to speak on a panel about both cities' respective rave scenes, I felt like I could not possibly tell anyone there anything that they had not already read about in the countless books about Berlin's history or the constant flow of journalistic pieces dedicated to what's happening in the now. I also knew that I had an incredibly limited idea of what had happened after my last long weekend in Budapest some years before, during which I went out once to see a German DJ play and after which, who knows, I might haven even told some people that it reminded me of Berlin in the 1990s. (I have not been to Berlin in the 1990s.)
Luckily, on that panel I was joined by Krisztián Puskár, who also DJs under the moniker Splatter or a combination of his real name and his alias, and has also worked as a music journalist and under the name Küss Mich organises leftfield club nights around the city while also co-curating the UH Fest and hosting radio shows. Puskár seemed deeply involved in the local scene to me but also like someone who felt most at home on its margins. This also becomes apparent when listening to his mix for our Groove podcast, a sprawling selection of tunes that mirrors Puskár's psychological state anticipating the turnout of the Hungarian 2022 parliamentary election in which Viktor Orbán and his Fidesz party received the majority of the votes, allowing them to make further constitutional changes, while trains full of war refugees from neighbouring Ukraine kept arriving.
The mix is accompanied by an in-depth interview that picks up on the key topics we discussed on our panel that was scheduled to roughly last an hour, but which came to an end after about three in the company of a dozen audience members who were eagerly sharing their perspective on the status quo of Budapest's club culture which exists and thrives very much on its own terms. As such, the interview sheds some light on recent developments in a vibrant scene while also highlighting Puskár's multi-faceted activities therein or adjacent to it.
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