“Something of an eccentric”
“Most of the people from the music industry think that I must be from London,” Cosmin Nicolae explains. He even had me fooled for a moment, despite the fact that I am, of course, myself English. He's got one of the most convincing British accents I've ever heard. “The ‘dubstep’ scene is pretty much a London thing,” he tells me. “Apart from a handful of producers, almost everyone in the scene is from London. I guess this makes me something of an eccentric”
Eccentric is one way of putting it. What's indisputable is that Cosmin, the Bucharest music producer known as Triggafinger, or Trigga, or Trig, or TRG, is growing in reputation as his nickname gets shorter and shorter. At just one syllable, his current moniker– just plain TRG – couldnt really get any more concise
Dubstep, in case you were wondering, is basically the latest incarnation of Grime, which is itself an offshoot of UK Garage (itself arguably a kind of offshoot of drum and bass). Confused? You should be. What's even more confusing is that this 24 year old producer has been attracting attention and putting out records that have been causing a stir in the ultra-fashionable dubstep scene, one that’s based thousands of miles away, in London. Grime, for example, the scene that produced Mercury Music Prize award winning artist Dizzee Rascal, basically doesn’t exist outside the British capital. It’s in fact even more localized, being based around a number of infamous London housing estates. It is, in its essence, young predominantly black kids rapping about London life – drugs, fights, and in particular, overblown, almost theatrical violence. And dubstep? Bear with me. It's a bit like Grime, but without the vocals – bass-heavy, dubby, slow-paced electronic hymns to urban life.
So what's a guy from Bucharest doing building a reputation in the exclusive Dubstep scene? Cosmin gives a laugh. “I started producing Dubstep about five months ago, and sent my tunes out to a few of the important UK DJs. One of them started playing my stuff in all his radio mixes, and through this the New York record label ‘Heavy Pressure’ got in touch with me. They've just put on a tune of mine, a 12 inch vinyl single.”
As if this wasn’t enough, there are other underground musical genres that Cosmin has his finger in. “I've got a breaks track of mine coming out on the label ‘Wireframe’ later this year, and a drum and bass tune lined up to be released on Spawn.” These vinyl releases, crucial in making your name known and getting played by other Djs, comes on top of the things TRG is releasing over the web, through so-called ‘netlabels’, which allow him to make his music available in a purely digital format.
Did I mention he also Djs? Or that he founded the hugely successful site drumandbass.ro? “We started that off in 2001, after coming back from the TMBase festival in Timisoara. Seeing the number of people who were into this kind of music gave us the impetus to start our own site up, a portal with a forum where people could communicate with each other and learn more about the scene.” The site has been instrumental in helping the drum and bass scene develop in Romania. It’s a kind of music I've always seen as having a huge following over here, though I've never quite been sure why or how. “It's accessible,” TRG tells me, himself having a big reputation for spreading the drum and bass sound as a DJ. “There are lots of DJs, lots of parties. What I hope is that people in Romania open their minds – and their ears – to new sounds like Dubstep. I want to see people taking a more open minded attitude towards music, not just following the big names, the big Djs, the big hits. None of us are making money out of this – we're just making an effort to move things forward. It needs to be better appreciated.”
I ask TRG if he's ever been interviewed by the mainstream press. He shakes his head. I ask if anyone has shown an interest in the media in what he's doing. Again, no. Once more, Romania has managed to surprise me by exactly what's going on here under the surface of things. Expect to hear more about TRG in the not-too-distant future. Let’s just hope the Romanian press picks up on him before he goes global.
For more on TRG and TRG-releated things, check out:
http://www.myspace.com/trgproductions
© Tom Wilson / Business Magazin 2006