Based between Bucharest and London, with a spell in Berlin along the way, Khidja carve out a difficult to place sound that leans into electro-informed machine flex and industrial muscle. The kind of roughly drawn, hardware-heavy sound that feels borne of underground spaces – figuratively and literally. Indeed, one of their earliest gigs was at The Web Club, a Bucharest institution that has long-since shuttered, but whose legacy lives in the artists the scene helped nurture.

The duo behind Khidja, Andrei Rusu and Florentin Tudor, actually met in school, which perhaps accounts for their wide-ranging tastes and shared intuition. Their DJ sets, like their productions, have a spontaneous feel, where ideas are allowed to develop, or drop off, depending on their own interior logic. The Khidja soundworld is, as we say, difficult to nail down, but contains the multifarious influences that have meshed in Bucharest itself over the years, from the Middle Eastern influences introduced by Turkish DJs to krautrock, via new wave, techno and a heavy dose of obscurantism. Their Crack Mix embraces the darker impulses of their sound: throbbing, distorted and disarmingly trippy, this is body music at its best.

Khidja play at Dekmantel Festival, 1- 5 August