EVERY GENRE PROJECT - September 28 - Rominimal
Genre of the Day - Rominimal 🇷🇴
Album of the Day - Invisibility by SIT (2017)
Rominimal is an all-time great genre neologism. Neologism is a word that I shall abuse, perhaps because I also make generous use of it as a concept, simply meaning a newly coined word. A neologism can be as integral as Shakespeare somehow being the first person to think to combine the words eye and ball into eyeball or as niche as rominimal, which brings together Romanian and minimal. The most world-famous Romanian (Moldovan, really, but Romanian language) musical contribution was anything but minimal; O-Zone’s “Dragostea Din Tei,” which absolutely brims with hooks, stands tall in my earliest memories of music and the Internet. It makes the case that Romanian and Moldovan dance pop has the knowhow to produce a maximalist banger, but Rominimal sees producers in the underground playing more negative space on the dancefloor.
Romania’s capital, Bucharest, was once lauded as “Paris of the East” for its late 1800s splendor and architecture. During this time, its art and architecture mixed three strains of great civilizations that had drawn crossroads over Romania and the Balkans, blending antique Byzantine, contemporary Ottoman, and omnipresent Renaissance styles. In the thirty-something years since Romania left its ailing statist economy alongside its neighbors, one can easily imagine the contrast between beholding those century-old monuments to glory against the brutalism and urban decay evident across Europe by the late 20th century. Like Berlin techno or the UK’s jungle, rominimal expresses these observations of gritty urbanism and the weight of history lightened if only by the desire to party.
Rominimal is a distinctive take stemming from ‘90s tech house, which fused techno production sensibilities and house beats in the underground as commercial iterations of each respective form was making headway individually into popular music. Starting in the late 2000s, rominimal emerged from—er—minimal and deep flavors of tech house like microhouse, weaving in its characteristic chirps, beeps into repetitive hypnotic loops. Minimalism in electronic music in particular is an impressive feat of restraint. Electronic musical machinery and DAWs have given musicians the capacity to stack seemingly endless levels of loops and textures on top of each other, an extremity explored in experimental genre phenomena (phenomagenre? neologism alert) like black MIDI. Thus, utilizing subtractive approaches and operating in the negative space of underground dance’s nighttime shades as in rominimal is a fruitful conceptual pursuit in the opposite direction.
SIT, shorthand for the aptly cryptic name “Sideways Invisibility Theory,” introduces rominimal with songs that feel like stepping into the eye of a dance storm—the clouds surround you, yet you can decipher each part of the music with clarity. Foggy keys roll through, pops and glitches tiptoe in and out of “Elevation” as a persistent acid techno bassline snakes through the taut rhythm. A dense critical mass of sounds pushes “Exhibit” forth; that minutes simple yet scintillating hi-hats and constantly present kicks can entrap you is rominimal’s talent, bells strumming through to add intrigue. “Concealed” ironically possesses a slightly brighter tone, vaguely reminiscent of the spirit of early ‘80s electro. The glitchy “Diatonic” sounds like a primordial deconstruction of Charli xcx’s “Guess,” which achieved a rare feat in bringing popularly dormant techno and fidget house sounds to 2024. Maybe rominimal could be next to bobble up in the zeitgeist, but for now, its trance-inducing loops will continue to pump under Bucharest.