why low frequencies?
some thoughts on music, community and showing up
Something’s been bugging me for a while, a feeling that’s hard to name, but I’ll try. It’s something between nostalgia and defiance, a mix of grief and pride for a music scene that’s small but persistent, cracked but not broken. This newsletter is a way to speak to that feeling. A way to write from it, with it. A way to say: I love this place, and I love music, and I don’t want either to fade away.
Cluj might look polished on the outside, all co-working spaces and overpriced cocktails, but if you’ve lived here long enough, you know that something is missing. Nightlife barely exists here anymore. A pandemic with long lasting repercussions, a limiting labour market, gentrification, and housing costs have all played their part in squeezing out the few spaces where creativity once gathered, danced, and sweated. Sure, some venues still book shows, and DJs still play. But the connective tissue, that messy, communal, slightly chaotic ecosystem that allows a scene to breathe, feels dangerously thin.
And yet, there are still so many of us. Musicians, DJs, dancers, artists. People working hard on their craft in silence, in bedrooms, in rehearsal spaces that cost too much. People with taste and talent and ideas, but nowhere to bring them together. so if the physical spaces are vanishing, maybe we need to reclaim space elsewhere. Here, for instance. In writing. In dialogue. Online, for now.
That’s what this newsletter hopes to be: a gathering point. Not just for me to speak, but for the local scene to feel seen. I want to document it, question it, praise it, complicate it. I want to cover international stuff too, but always with one foot rooted here. In the local. because what’s missing most isn’t hot takes or dj mixes. It’s care. It’s the simple, radical act of paying attention.
My own path into music has always been local first. I grew up in Bacau, in the early 2000s, when subcultures meant something. My town was split between rockers, punkisti, rappers, and manelisti. Not exactly a utopia, but you learned early that music meant identity.
Subcultures weren’t just aesthetic choices, they were ecosystems of belonging. Music signaled not only taste, but values, allegiances, ways of being in the world. These micro scenes were clumsy, chaotic, today, maybe cringeworthy. But they offered something the algorithm can’t: social rituals, shared risks, actual people. Looking back, hanging out with some drunk punks seems less dangerous than what teens now face alone in the digital dark. Isolated, radicalized, flattened by the algorithms.
That sense of music as a structure for identity, tension, and togetherness, is what this newsletter is tuned to. Not nostalgia, but the connective tissue between sound and social life. And maybe, a way to imagine other, better collectives, before the next scroll decides for us.
There have been many stages and iterations of music culture around me that influenced me. Like it probably did to you. Some things stuck, like my incurable affection for anything with a synth line, which I’m pretty sure traces back to those endless afternoons watching I Love the 80s reruns on VH1, soaking in the neon nostalgia without even knowing what I was being wired for. And years later would pair well with Shelter nights.
Others left me. Not in a dramatic way, but like friends you drift from, you remember them fondly, maybe you run into them once in a while at a party or on a playlist, but the connection isn’t quite the same.
Later on, I discovered that my hometown had housed one of Romania’s longest standing electronic music clubs: Zebra. That’s where my story with electronic music began, in a small city, in a dark room, with a sound that stretched beyond anything I’d known. From there, it was a deep dive: minimal, deep house, techno, ambient, whatever you could dig up online or find on shady torrents. I didn’t know it then, but I was building a sensibility.
Fast forward to now, and most of my musical life unfolds online. soundcloud tabs multiply, bandcamp fridays come and go. This isn’t a complaint, I love that I can discover so much on a late night deep dive. The access is wild. The curiosity is fed. And still, something feels quietly at risk.
Because for all this abundance, the offline is thinning out. And here in Cluj, it’s especially visible. Nightlife has shrunk. There are barely some venues. It’s harder now to just show up and feel part of something.
In a way, we’ve become passive consumers of what we love. We scroll, we listen, we buy, but do we act? In music, as in everything else, the more we let convenience dictate what we engage with, the more we slip into passivity. And when we’re passive, we surrender our agency, not just as listeners, but as people with the potential to create, challenge, and change.
Due to this, we’ve come to this strange moment where, in Cluj, like in many other places, we’ve started to believe that loving music means being a DJ, especially a male DJ. But what about all the other ways to be part of a scene? What about listening deeply, writing thoughtfully, showing up consistently? What about supporting something because it moves you, not because it puts you on a lineup? To care for music is also to care for the conditions that allow it to thrive.
I’m not here to point fingers or critique. Rather, I want to be part of the conversation. Or even start a conversation. I want to carve out a space for exploration, where we can dive into musical discovery, share lesser known gems, and have the kind of conversations that don’t always fit the algorithm formula.
Because in the end it’s not just music. It's everything. The world feels darker, and we are all too accustomed to feeling powerless. But I believe that if we can bring intention back into even the smallest parts of our lives, into the music we listen to, the spaces we create, the conversations we have, we can start to build something different. We may need to push back. The future isn’t looking bright, and if we don't take action, we risk watching it all fade away passively. It’s time to care more, think deeper, and act with purpose.
This isn’t about looking back or trying to resurrect something that’s gone. It’s about recognizing what we have now, and how we can still shape it. It’s about memory, but not in a way that freezes time. It’s about caring for the scene, for the connections it can create, and for the way music can still bring people together. Not just sounds, not only online, but people, histories, and hopes. In a city where it’s harder to find space for those connections to from in real life, maybe this newsletter can be a kind of holding space.
And im not trying to be an authority either. I barely know anything. I’m just someone who still cares, maybe more than I should. Maybe naive. However, I’ve been around subcultures long enough to know they’re fragile and fleeting. But they’ve shaped me. They still do. And even if we’re told they’re dead, I know better. Because I see the people who keep showing up, headphones on, hearts open.
So if you’re one of them, a listener, a raver, a dreamer, a skeptic, a bedroom digger, I hope you’ll subscribe. This is your space too.
I’ll be posting about once or twice a month, just enough to stay connected without adding more noise to your life.
This newsletter is just the beginning. It’s an invitation to stay curious, to engage, and to be part of something bigger than passive consumption. As we move forward, I’ll be sharing more: reports from local parties, conversations with the artists and promoters who shape Cluj’s scene, deep dives into the city’s nightlife history, and profiles of the spaces that keep the pulse alive.
And to get things started, here's a sneak peek and a mashup of what's coming up. The April roundup is just a taste a collection of mixes and readings that I think will keep you busy until the next one. Stay tuned, because there’s so much more to come.
🎛️ April Selects
A handful of mixes that hit different this past month.
❤︎ System Olympia – NTS live
❤︎ Barker - Resident Advisor
❤︎ Super Venus – themuddshow
❤︎ Bruno Schmidt – Yoyaku Instore
❤︎ Clovis – themuddshow
🛰️ Low Signal
Some signals from the music world
Romania’s flagship electronic music festival Sunwaves is coming to an end, not because of artistic failure but because of political cowardice. This is not just a logistical story, it’s a war on drugs with music and nightlife as collateral.
A thoughtful and cute read on how science could save clubbing and reconnect it with its core purpose of collective joy. All that possible due to neuroscience. Read the opinion piece here, and while you’re at it, check out the accompanying documentary. We Become One: The Power Of The Shared Musical Experience
An expansive Resident Advisor conversation with FKA twigs about embodiment, fantasy, and artistic futures.
+ one from the archives, but no less urgent. Since I’ve just finished the book - Mood Machine, and a lot the thoughts in the there have guided my writing, I will link to this article: The Ghosts in the Machine, which is part of the whole book, which I’m obviously also recommending.
A deep dive into a track that still shimmers decades later. Romance, oddity, and pure synthetic bliss. This is a required reading & listening.
🔭 Coming Soon
What Low Frequencies hopes to become
This is just the surface. In future editions, expect:
Field reports from local parties and listening sessions
Interviews with artists and promoters shaping Cluj’s scene
Archival dives into local histories
Spotlights on venues and the people who hold space
Guest writer takeovers - im open for anything 👀
If you made it this far, thank you. ❤︎ Thanks for reading this much-longer-than-usual first issue. Next one will be shorter (I hope).
bine, fată! ☝️
Exciiiiiiiting !!!!