Hungarian electronic composer and producer István Gazdag — the mind behind First Aid 4 Souls — sat down for a wide-ranging conversation that reaches well past the studio. Conducted by Inferno Sound Diaries and carried on Side-Line, the talk traces a career rooted in Budapest’s underground since the late 1980s and takes in his views on art, technology and life in Hungary.
Gazdag frames his many aliases — Vacuum and its later mutation Vacuum (X), the dancefloor-minded First Aid Tech, the EBM outlet Stahlgeist — as shifting moods of one restless personality, with First Aid 4 Souls as the project where he feels most himself. He recalls a childhood shaped by classical lessons and the arrival of Kraftwerk in Hungary, then the jolt of Cabaret Voltaire, Yello and Skinny Puppy, and describes a catalogue of more than a hundred collaborations spread across the globe. As a member of the Some Bizzare circle he has reworked tracks for names such as Coil, Soft Cell, Test Dept., Cabaret Voltaire and Einstürzende Neubauten, work he still speaks about with real affection.
The discussion turns sharply political when it reaches Hungary under Viktor Orbán, which Gazdag depicts as a country worn down and financially hollowed out, while insisting he follows no party line. He is unimpressed by artificial intelligence as a compositional tool — useful for wrestling with dense philosophical questions, he says, but of little value at the mixing desk — and he lays out an unusual creative ritual of pushing a new piece to its peak before wiping it with a hard reset and rebuilding it from memory the next day. Much of the later conversation circles the ideas behind his newest record and the thinkers, from Pavlov to Foucault, that feed it.
The album at the centre of the talk, “Totems In A Field Of Pain”, arrived on Alfa Matrix on 26 June 2026 and can be streamed in full over on Bandcamp. It follows the female-voiced “Progenitrix”, the 2025 set built around a roster of singers Gazdag dubs the “Divas Of The Dark.”
Read the full conversation
Gazdag goes much deeper on his philosophy, his studio gear and the social questions driving his writing in the complete exchange. Read the full interview on Side-Line.
About First Aid 4 Souls
First Aid 4 Souls is the primary project of Budapest-based musician István Gazdag, a composer who fuses industrial, dark-electro and EBM. He first surfaced during the mid-1980s fronting Vacuum, an early dark-electro and EBM act indebted to Cabaret Voltaire, Yello and Skinny Puppy; that outfit eventually mutated into the poetry-infused, multi-disciplinary Vacuum (X). The First Aid 4 Souls name reached Belgian imprint Alfa Matrix in August 2019 via a label-debut EP, soon joined by the album “Keep This World Empty.” A 2020 single, “Fire,” paid homage to the Hungarian subculture hub LD50.hu, and the “Dreambox” EP landed that same October.
“I Am The Night” arrived in May 2022, while 2023 proved busy: the mini-album “Dancing At The Abyss” shared the year with the EP “Laudator Temporis Acti” and with “This Present Darkness,” a vast 70-track survey of the back catalogue. The darkwave- and post-punk-leaning “Progenitrix” closed out 2025, built around the guest singers billed as the “Divas Of The Dark,” before the current full-length “Totems In A Field Of Pain” appeared on Alfa Matrix on 26 June 2026. Gazdag keeps two further outlets running: the dancefloor-tilted First Aid Tech, which bowed with a December 2023 EP, and Stahlgeist, an old-school EBM concern that signed to Alfa Matrix back in October 2022 and now sits on hold. Beyond his own records, his remix credits as part of the Some Bizzare family take in Coil, Soft Cell, Test Dept., Cabaret Voltaire and Einstürzende Neubauten. Browse more of the label’s roster over on the Alfa Matrix Bandcamp.