Searching for autonomy in the Hungarian underground

In Hungary’s electronic underground, an interconnected web of collectives, multi-purpose spaces, and SoundCloud visionaries persist under pressure.

“Shall we have an event tomorrow?” asked Gergő, in between sips of a crisp Kőbányai and puffs of a well-rolled cigarette. I thought he was joking. I had landed in Budapest less than 12 hours earlier, and I’d only known Gergő for maybe five minutes. Before I could ask questions, he was manically pacing around the little outdoor table we were stationed at, speaking rapid Hungarian into his phone and gesturing wildly with his cigarette hand. The others at the table paid no mind—this, I would learn, was not unusual for a man colloquially known in the scene as “the Mayor.” By the time Gergő’s cigarette burnt to a nub, he’d booked beloved bar/cafe/venue Susuka, and by the time his Kőbányai was finished, he’d designed a deep-fried flyer on PicsArt, contacted a host of local musicians, and confirmed a lineup and set times. The entire process took no more than 20 minutes from meeting to Instagram post. 

The next evening, a small procession of about ten cycled in and out of the cramped Susuka basement, a low-ceilinged room illuminated only by a screensaver projection of Lil B. Beneath the digital altar of the Based God, a shiesty-wearing DJ, 100xszep, spun the sinusoidal melodies of Edward Skeletrix and o0o’s “Life’s So Funny”; a huddled group of fur-hooded teens, who Gergő referred to as “the Nettspend kids,” bobbed their heads silently to the beat. Most attendees gathered outside the bar, smoking in ritualistic circles. At Susuka, these impromptu, space-limited events sometimes function more as an incidental occasion to chain-smoke and catch up than to listen intently to the music. 

The event was hosted by the Marmint Agency. Founded in early 2023 by Gergő (Gergely Csontos), a prolific laptop producer under the name SUTA and PicsArt visionary, Marmint takes the word “agency” very literally, operating as a platform for outsider musicians throughout Hungary. It’s a safe haven of sorts amid an authoritarian government that persecutes marginalized identities across the country. Over a piping hot hosszú kávé (long coffee) at cultural center Három Holló, Gergő explains the agency’s ethos: “The most important part of Marmint,” Gergő says, “is letting artists represent themselves the way they want to be.” 

Marmint’s catalog showcases a dizzying blend of leftfield electronic music, from Réti Virág‘s stretched-vocal soundscapes to GŐZKABIN’s frantic proto-club to AUX’s metallic gabber to cursedfella’s nostalgic ambience to panidivoka’s ear-splitting noise. Perhaps the most representative sound of the Hungarian electronic underground is SUTA and asvany’s EP “Rémvadon // Bolond!” Horse gallops and pastoral strings meet disintegrating dubstep kicks, feathery basslines and broken-beat rhythms.

The Marmint network has also become a jumping-off point for a strain of distinctive Hungarian rap, highlighted by vinben’s subtle whisper-trap, 100xszep’s blown-out blend of Hungarian and English, and előd’s melodic jerk. előd’s nasal sound draws from xaviersobased but adds a melancholic South Hungarian twist: on “tanonc,” he teams up with “patchmade” producer kashpaint, layering vocal harmonies over bone-crunching 808s and soaring synths.

I stumbled upon Marmint’s nascent guest mix series in my college dorm sometime mid-2023, on my near-daily binge through endless spirals of SoundCloud likes. From the first listen, Marmint felt different, like I had discovered something meant to be unearthed. I ran through every mix without stopping, entranced by the visceral textures and cathartic energy of ecovoron, pepee, and gnosis’s chaotic collages. I couldn’t quite figure out why the music had me in such a chokehold—but it was bursting with color and life, with the freedom that comes from a movement in its sonic genesis, before definition or stagnation. Having grown accustomed to the grinding industry mechanics of New York, which felt increasingly clout-chasey and transactional, it was refreshing to hear this unmistakable sense of authenticity pulsing through the Hungarian SoundCloud world. I was determined to experience the scene firsthand. 

Around that same time in 2023, Marmint’s local network began to form in-person through a series of small shows in Budapest, including the representative event “Microwave,” held at the mines of Art Quarter Budapest in collaboration with the FamilyFast collective. This seminal show was promoted on Instagram with a cryptic proclamation, a digital tablet inscribed with the manifesto of the Agency: 

↓ Marmint Agency: Hungarian Music Agency

Emerging from peripheral Depths of SoundCloud to find New Paths of Representation.

Artists must be encouraged to find the Autonomy of Self-Depiction.

“…and Be Confident, Persevere, Work Hard…”

It’s easy to lose your way in the murky depths of SoundCloud. Even the most evocative, mind-blowing tracks can get buried with 40-odd plays. In Hungary, Marmint functions as a conduit for artists that might otherwise disappear into online obscurity—it’s a home for outsider musicians to find and craft their voice, a stepping stone towards SoundCloud self-determination.

Gergő—raised on a farm in the “Tarkovskian wasteland” of Talfája, population roughly 300—works especially hard to create these paths of representation for artists from the Hungarian countryside: “I know how it goes when you’re living in a countryside town and you don’t have anybody who’s interested in this type of music,” Gergő tells me. “Most of my friends and I, we were making music for six, seven years without any kind of feedback. There are lots of artists from the countryside who don’t fit into these typical labels, and they don’t have a chance to have a performance at an event or even to have a proper release.” 

One of these outsider artists is Tatabánya-born, Budapest-based Burial acolyte Mt. Saint Michel, who fondly reminisces on the day he came out of the shower to find his SoundCloud inbox bursting with notifications from the Marmint talent scouts. At first, he says, “Nobody was listening to me, and then randomly all these guys messaged me at once… I was a bit suspicious.” Now, three years later, he’s just released his debut album, “Ephemera,” a seamless blend of iPhone-recorded-siren-ambience and stuttering two-step, via Virginia-based online label formforum—and preceded by a premiere on Marmint, of course. 

Another countryside-raised musician central to Marmint is the enigmatic Viktor Kovács, a man of many aliases and cryptic SoundCloud profiles. The Hungarian underground is dominated by laptop producers and raw, hard-hitting electronica, but Kovács almost single-handedly supplies the scene’s acoustic representation, whether through minimalist guitar production for vinben’s signature whisper-rap ballads, one-man-band slacker-rock throwaways, or melancholic hypnagogia via his Szeged-born band acceptyrfate. Kovács has also helped diversify the DJ-centric events in Budapest, booking London-based etta97 and great area to play alongside acceptyrfate at Három Holló in late 2024—a show which resulted in a return date for the band in London just a few months later. 

“It’s a friend group, you know,” says Gergő of the Budapest music scene. “It’s like a village, everyone knows everyone in the city. So it’s kind of a safe space when we make an event, community-based in a certain way that might not be the same in Western Europe.” Marmint is just one of an interlacing network of collectives in Budapest. While these collectives often collaborate—or, in good spirit, schedule events on the same night—the friend-group feel is apparent at most local shows, where you’re bound to run into a familiar face or two, no matter who’s hosting. 

The 141 bus rumbled past my intended stop, depositing me at the corner of Komló utca. Glued to Google Maps, I walked briskly through the empty streets of Budafok, which was quiet in that unnerving, industrial-outskirts way where typically quotidian sounds jump out and you’re acutely aware of your own footsteps. The silence was interrupted only by a dog straining at a chain-link fence; in the distance, a solitary smokestack exhaled into the cold night sky. 

The underground tunnels of Art Quarter Budapest are buried deep under the Buda Hills, inside a network of limestone mines on the site of the former Haggenmacher brewery. I could hear the bass from outside the venue, and I followed traces of pounding kicks down a winding, graffitied ramp, through a translucent tarp entrance, and into the depths of a cavernous cellar complex. A lineup of experimental musicians fronted the bill for this year’s Davória / Legion collab event; high-frequency noise artist Afom Aru was commandeering one of the long tunnel rooms, whirling a maelstrom of no-input fuckery through a thick smoke-machine fog. There were two separate “stages” in the mines, one hosting freetek DJs and one hosting noise acts, and the intertwining sub-frequencies from each created a constant, soothing rumble that felt primeval, embryonic—as if the mine walls held ancestral sonic memories of long-ago dynamite detonations, a palimpsest of lowend eternally bouncing around the tunnels. 

That night, I was supposed to interview the elusive Daddypower Records founder Máté Elod Janky (Alley Catss), but I was swallowed up by the mines—and I couldn’t find him anywhere. Days later, we finally met aboveground at Három Holló, where Máté, who has a reputation for intense, improvised laptop performances, told me about his initiation into the Budapest electronic music scene in 2011 as a 13-year-old Ableton neophyte: “I spent a lot of time in front of screens as a child,” Máté told me. “I was on Tumblr a lot, discovering music through Last.fm, getting into witch house. And then one thing led to another, I got Ableton and started experimenting. It was funny. I was still in high school in my hometown, and I felt like I was leading a double life.” 

Around 2014, Máté created a Bandcamp profile that would eventually blossom into post-internet label Daddypower Records, where he curates an eclectic mix of outsider electronic music, focusing on sounds “on the edge of things or not very easy to define.” In the decade-plus he’s been active in Budapest, Máté has seen sounds and scenes come and go, but he’s especially intrigued by a recent resurgence of noise: “There is a change in the zeitgeist… I feel a surge of interesting noise music, even on Instagram Reels. It feels somehow more present. [Daddypower] used to be more international, but nowadays, after discovering this new noise scene and getting to know people, I started turning toward this [local] scene.” 

Noise has been creeping slowly into the Budapest underground for years, perhaps as a reflection of growing economic and political frustrations, perhaps just as cathartic expression amid an increasingly fragmented scene. Noise shows in Budapest take place anywhere a set of PAs can be squeezed—in dilapidated buildings, half-legal industrial spaces, abandoned basements. One formative event, staged in the scrap-strewn junkyard of Art Quarter Budapest, was shut down by police due to a noise complaint (fitting!).

That show was the genesis of nonprofit collective ZAJ+, the current torch-bearers for noise in Budapest. Formed in 2023, ZAJ+ treats noise as a condition that has to be experienced, routinely organizing hybrid noise shows/art exhibitions at a rotating series of unique venues: “I look at noise as not just a musical genre, it is very physical,” co-founder eszeveszett tells me. “You can play the best fucking set in a boring space.” After a recent pilgrimage to Japan, the Mecca for noise musicians, eszeveszett returned to Budapest with renewed purpose: “Noise music is not deeply rooted here, and we don’t really have a central hub of experimental underground culture like Kōenji in Tokyo,” he says. “But still, we have to keep events accessible and keep building this small local scene.” 

For organizers in Hungary, inviting musicians from abroad comes with a different set of calculations than those in nearby cities like Vienna, where plentiful EU cultural funds attract bigger artists and cushion the financial risks of event planning. Dance Party is one newer organization in Budapest attempting to bridge the Hungarian and Western European scenes. “Our purpose,” co-founder Samu Madarasz tells me, “is mainly to introduce Hungarian people to artists that have been in the scene in the EU, but haven’t really reached a bigger following here.” 

That mission was on full display at a Dance Party and Club Punk collab event held at Palazzo Permanenz this past November. The lineup spanned three continents—New York indie sleazers Garett Caramel and Velvette Blue, Australian producer SUS1ER, and a slate of local acts, including vinben and előd, performing live. The night devolved into anarchy when the skinny-jeaned, red-gloved Velvette Blue took the stage, gyrating on top of the tables behind the DJ decks, whipping the crowd into a frenzy while chanting “NEW YORK CITY” and urging the clearly unimpressed, portly sound guy to “TURN IT UP!” Just as it reached a fever pitch, an attendee’s plastic beer cup spilled onto the decks—short-circuiting the system and wrecking the show. In the wake of the chaos, Samu was unceremoniously thrown out on the street by the enraged venue owner, who had failed to insure the DJ equipment. But Samu’s glee at the collective hedonism was palpable: “Nobody’s ever had a party like this here before,” he told me with a triumphant glint in his eyes. 

The same colorful, autodidactic spirit that animates Hungarian SoundCloud music runs through the scene’s visual culture, with flyers, cover art, and ephemera decorated with ornate designs, maximalist fonts, and rarely an inch of dead space. One of the most visible expressions of this visual language appears in the Marmint logo, which features the Csodaszarvas, a mythical golden stag from a central Hungarian origin myth, superimposed on a globe wearing headphones. Gergő, whose PicsArt designs from his art account bloodythinkpad adorn the Marmint Instagram, explains the logo: “The globe listening to music, it’s straight up a meme,” he tells me. “I just used it because I was always really into Hungarian folklore, and I thought it would be cool trying not to demonize Hungarian history.” This folklore-centric visual language loops back into the sound: bloodythinkpad now functions as the SoundCloud home for Gergő’s frantic footwork experiments, alongside his new juke label, HUNGAROTEK, whose logo reworks another cultural touchpoint—a bottle of the dark, herbal liquor Unicum, the “working-class spirit of Hungary,” according to Gergő—emblazoned with the name of the record label. 

While Marmint’s aesthetics recontextualize shared cultural symbols, others lean more into personal experiences. Norbert Török is one of the most prominent visual artists; his gory flyers and live visuals provide a backdrop to most SavMegye events. Inspired primarily by games like Bloodborne and Armored Core, Török’s maximalist aesthetic ravenously rejects “proper” methods of design. “I got a degree in graphic design in Győr, and I didn’t like the way they teach design or think about it,” Török told me. “So my inspiration is just to ruin that [traditional] aesthetic.” 

Elsewhere in the scene, a group of online friends moves fluidly through the city’s Instagram-centric visual ecosystem. Nóri Kiss, f0revem0re, and Fehér W. E’s playful, intricate designs decorate countless SoundCloud covers and event posters. Kiss gravitates towards post-humanism and the blurred line between digital and organic, while f0revem0re’s style emerges from 2000s anime and furry culture. Fehér W. E, meanwhile, has assumed a curatorial role in the scene, often organizing exhibitions in collaboration with ZAJ+. She dreams of local music and art events merging into one, helping fans of either medium get involved in the other: “I think it adds to the experience of the music. It’s not just decorations.” Fehér said. 

Graphics by Akira Csernovszky, Hanna Szabó-Sáfrány, & Rozi Vincze

Hungarian underground music is inherently political, its struggle for autonomy and agency formed in response to a far-right government that has made the lives of marginalized communities in Hungary increasingly precarious. In March 2025, Viktor Orbán and the Hungarian government passed a draconian law banning the right of assembly for public events that depict “divergence from self-identity corresponding to sex at birth, sex change or homosexuality,” a bill that was clearly targeted at the yearly Budapest Pride parade. In response, Gergő worked with Réti Virág and Chris Krakoczki to organize a gargantuan 103-track compilation, “Tüskebölcső” (Cradle of Thorns), released on Marmint in support of the upcoming Pride march. The objective of the VA was to get as much international exposure as possible, so the organizers put out an open call, and the response was overwhelming—the compilation was preceded by almost 15 premieres on a variety of labels ranging from Slovakian publishing platform Swine Daily to Danish hard ambient label katharsis. The final result arrived with a beautiful design courtesy of trance/ambient producer ecovoron, and “Tüskebölcső” was accompanied by a direct message: 

Due to a recent law in Hungary, made to limit the right of assembly, amongst other minorities, the LGBTQ community and Budapest Pride face uncertain times.

The only answer to this, is to unite and let our voices be heard.

We need to safeguard queer spaces.

Electronic music has always been a safe space for the queer community, so we’re launching a compilation in solidarity with Budapest Pride on the 28th of June, 2025.

The Budapest scene survives on a patchwork of multipurpose cultural spaces that keep the community alive through collective organization and resistance, despite rapidly rising operational costs and nonexistent institutional support. Venues like Gólya, Kripta, and Art Quarter Budapest are almost entirely volunteer-run and often operate like co-ops, leaving creative freedom to the organizers and artists. Many of these multi-level spaces also serve as gathering points for musicians, artists, and the wider Budapest alternative community—such as the iconic Nyolcésfél in Józsefváros, a Soviet-era telecommunications building whose server rooms were repurposed into affordable rehearsal studios, workshops, and multiple venues, including the “sonic shelter” listening room N° space. Events in Budapest circulate primarily on Facebook, which might seem antiquated, but is an intentional move to keep scenes local, according to Gergő: “We don’t use Resident Advisor here. Just because Resident Advisor is very international in a sense. And in Hungary, Facebook, it’s only for the locals. It’s much easier.”

While the recent work of collectives like Marmint has been instrumental in providing representation for under-represented voices, Budapest scene vets have experienced firsthand how hard it is to operate with such little institutional support. Valentina Várhelyi—artist-activist and co-founder of the pioneering FamilyFast rave-organizing collective and 111records label—has written extensively on the deep-rooted issues facing the Hungarian music ecosystem. In June of 2024, she interviewed Gergő and Gólya founder Sándor Kispál for an EasternDaze article chronicling Marmint’s role as it burst into the Budapest network and examined the pressures facing spaces like Gólya. When I spoke with Várhelyi about how her thoughts on the Hungarian scene have evolved since the article’s publication, her tone was brutally honest. 

“What I see now,” Várhelyi tells me, “is that building this kind of community is actually almost self-abusive. You burn out because there’s no system to support you.” She adds, “I was really hopeful at the time [of the article]…I wanted justice for the people whose voices were suppressed, for those who didn’t get opportunities. But now things are different. Far-right ideology pushes everything deeper into the for-profit side, and that pressure forces us to make compromises within the culture.” 

Várhelyi hopes that an injection of EU funding can help create a future of widely available, communal events: “I think people should not pay for culture,” she declares. “It is their right.”

Musicians in Budapest often speak of escape, and those few artists who “make it” do so elsewhere, having achieved enough to join the crowded pastures of London, Berlin, and Paris. Yet they always return for events—missing that visceral Budapest energy, that tight-knitness that seems so hard to find in Western Europe. When there’s no clout to chase, no funding to be found, the music always comes first.

One night, after a few too many Kőbányais, I tried—again—to articulate to Gergő this special spirit that felt so present throughout the online and offline scene, the inexplicable feeling behind why Marmint resonated with me so much when I first stumbled on it in my college dorm. I waxed nostalgic about how taken I had been by the music and people in Budapest—and how I was still searching to understand why.

“It is the passion,” he said with conviction. “You felt the passion.” 

Maybe that’s the simplest explanation. Even in the most barren of conditions, what emerges from the peripheral depths of SoundCloud isn’t due to algorithmic chance—it emerges because it insists on being heard, a testament to a community’s passion, persistence, and desire for self-determination.

In tandem with this piece, SUTA has curated a playlist with a selection of some of the finest works across the sprawling Hungarian scene – all available on SoundCloud, of course.