István Gazdag interview: ‘Art and music don’t just play a role, they are the only thing that still makes me believe in humanity’

István Gazdag is a Hungarian Electronic musician, producer, and composer who has been part of the underground Electronic music scene since the late 1980s. I have followed his work for years and have always been impressed by his main project, First Aid 4 Souls, in which he blends a variety of genres, ranging from Industrial and Dark-Electro to EBM. He is also involved in several other musical projects, including Stahlgeist, Vacuum X, and First Aid Tech. I suspect that few people are aware of the many prominent artists he has worked with over the years. This is a testament not only to his immense talent but also, and perhaps more importantly, to his remarkable instinct for sound, arrangements, and remixes. I often wonder whether he would have gained much wider recognition had he been based in a country with a more established Electronic music scene. His talent and creativity truly know no bounds. Yet beyond the musician lies an equally fascinating individual: someone with a sharp, clear-eyed perspective on our society and the complexities of human relationships and interactions. This interview goes beyond music, delving into his personal philosophy, his observations on the world around him, and the ideas that shape his artistic vision. What follows is an account of the conversation I had with him. (Courtesy by Inferno Sound Diaries)

István Gazdag interview

Q: István, what can you tell us about your musical background, and how did you first come into contact with underground Electronic music, which eventually led you to become the musician you are today?

István: I went to music school from primary school age, but I was never really good at anything. My mother took great care that my classical music education would be outstanding. By the end of the seventies, Kraftwerk fever had reached Hungary too, and these two strong influences marked my childhood. I got synthesizers from an uncle in America, made loops on crappy cassette tapes and played over them. Then in the mid-eighties Cabaret Voltaire and Yello came along, and around 1988 Skinny Puppy. The rest was a given.

Q: Over the years you’ve started quite a few projects. What does each one mean to you individually, and do you see them as different sides of the same artist, or rather as separate entities?

István: More like moods of the same eternally rebellious character. But the main line is First Aid 4 Souls; that’s where I’m true to myself.

Q: I understand Vacuum was your first project. What have you kept from those beginnings, and what has changed radically since then in your general approach to style, composing and production? And what is the difference for you today between Vacuum, Vacuum(X), First Aid 4 Souls, First Aid Tech and Stahlgeist?

István: Vacuum was the energetic experimentation of two crazy kids inspired by Cabaret Voltaire and Skinny Puppy. Technically, even back then I was far above the Hungarian average. I lent instruments to other Hungarian bands too, and never asked for anything in return. I still work with those instruments today. I can program the Ensoniq EPS 16 with my eyes closed… I think nothing has changed, except that I can mix my songs much more beautifully now. I still compose in a kind of Trance, completely shutting out the illusion that others experience as reality.

Vacuum is ancient Hungarian Dark-Electro/EBM, while Vacuum (X) has by now become a multi-disciplinary art project flirting with contemporary poetry. First Aid Tech is my more danceable side, Stahlgeist, currently on ice for a longer period, is the playground of my old-school EBM devotion, and First Aid 4 Souls is all of this at once, multiplied.

Q: Over the years you’ve worked with quite a lot of people, especially vocalists. Do you have specific criteria when choosing who to work with, and what have you learned from these collaborations?

István: I’ve worked with an incredible number of people and bands. The number of collaborations, public and non-public, is over 100, and truly on every continent. I’m always surprised by how professional they are. Seriously. I have a kind of confident arrogance, but the other artist’s astonishing talent always puts it in its place. What I’ve learned is that all the colors are there in the darkness, and that sensitive people often hide behind toughness.

Q: Do you need a particular mood or state of mind to make music for a given project, or how does that process work for you?

István: It’s very strange, but negative or tragic things make me angry, and anger breeds creativity. I think that’s why I still have my mind, and why I still have so much to say.

Q: Perhaps not everyone knows that you’ve made remixes for big names like Coil, Soft Cell, Test Dept., Cabaret Voltaire or Einstürzende Neubauten… How did these opportunities come about, and how did you approach making the remixes? Did you have personal contact with the artists, and did you get feedback from them?

István: I’m a member of the Some Bizzare family, and I was welcomed as one. The notorious Stevo, however self-willed he may be, is a good man deep down. At least to me. He paved my way, and through him I also got my membership in the UK Musicians’ Union (MU). And yes, I received feedback from the icons of my life. Test Department wrote that they would use my remix in the backing tracks for their concerts, and The Grid was also very appreciative. Recently there was talk of me being an active contributor to a secret Coil reissue as well.

Q: In an earlier interview you said that music must offer meaningful content and be able to fill a kind of inner emptiness. I find this interesting, especially considering the role and impact of art in a world burdened by conflict, alienation, division and the like. How do you see this, and what role does art, especially music, play in your own life?

István: In my intellectual life, art and music don’t just play a role, they are the only thing that still makes me believe in humanity. Without art, a human being is less than an animal.

Q: You seem like a very artistic person, and some of your music is connected to writers, paintings and other art forms. You had the chance to work on multidisciplinary projects where different art forms met so would you like to explore this in the future again, and if so, what would you imagine?

István: Oh, I can’t even list how many such projects I’ve been part of… Besides film and ballet scores, there were signature tunes for world championships, musical identities for global companies, title music for TV shows. I haven’t just explored it, I’ve been an active shaper of it. I’m also working right now on a segment of music, typography and contemporary Hungarian poetry, but let that remain a secret for a while.

Q: Dark and bleak themes have always been a kind of muse for scenes like EBM, Dark-Electro and Industrial. But today many of these dystopian themes have simply become reality. Do they still work as a kind of muse or fantasy, or have they perhaps evolved into a form of resistance?

István: This world can only be told truthfully in a whisper or a scream. Both sound good in these genres…

Q: In countries run by conservative or oppressive leaders, music and art are often closely watched or controlled. What was the situation in Hungary under Viktor Orbán’s rule, and have you noticed any change under the current government?

István: In Hungary, nobody persecuted artists who rebelled against the Orbán regime. They only threatened to. But they did everything, literally everything, to ruin them financially and isolate them mentally. This greatly raised the quality but reduced the reach.

Orbán and his rabble are a plague. Hungary was days away from a Belarusian nightmare. At this moment it is one of the most mentally and spiritually burned-out, financially completely plundered countries in Europe. This gave my best songs their ammunition. And I’d like to tell you something. I don’t follow any political direction. Anti-fascism has been a basic human minimum expectation since the Holocaust, but that doesn’t mean I’m a leftist. Anti-communism is an obvious human reaction for anyone born into a communist dictatorship (like me), but that doesn’t mean I’m a rightist. There is one important thing I can tell you: now that the capital-funded liberal elite has unleashed chaos on you, don’t think that the far-right response to it will help. It will bring hell down on your heads. I can say this because I have lived in both. I have made music in both.

Q: Back to music: what does your studio look like, and how has it evolved over the years alongside technological changes? And what is your opinion on the use of artificial intelligence in composing music?

István: I have a serious studio and a Jack Dangers-level sound bank (well, okay, half of it 🙂 ). You’d never believe it, but until a few years ago my workstation was a crappy old PC pulled out of a school’s junk clearance. You don’t need more for MIDI, and Nuendo 2 ran nicely on it 🙂 Now I have a serious computer, but I’m still surrounded by real ‘hardware’ instruments. I only work this way now. In fact, the new Vacuum X is largely a mix of EPS sequencer and live Osmose improvisation.

AI doesn’t bother me. It often helps me think through extremely difficult philosophical or social-science work. In music it’s of no use to me. I devoted a day to it and tried it. I can make better effects 🙂

Q: Do you have any special habits or rituals when you start working on a new song or album? Could you tell us a bit more about your working method?

István: My only ritual is this: when I first catch the theme, I give it everything and try to reach the maximum, and when I feel that this is good, this will last, I shoot the system down with a hard reset, without saving. It’s a burnt offering. The burning of the ego. Then the next day I play it again. There are many hundreds of these; often I finish them over many years.

Q: I find the latest First Aid Tech album, “Back To Agartha”, a very special production because of the many influences you blend together. I especially hear the influence of Juno Reactor; Ben Watkins is an absolute god to me. Could you tell us more about the album and the inspirations behind it?

István: Ben Watkins! I think I don’t need to say more 🙂 By the way, did you know that my Psy-Trance records have reached 10,000 direct downloads? Look up my FA4S albums “Navigator” or “Back To Shambala” on the Psy-Trance site Ektoplazm.

Q: Last year you released what might be the most surprising First Aid 4 Souls album yet, “Progenitrix”, especially because of the “Divas Of The Dark” contributions, a selection of female vocalists. How did the idea for this concept come about, and how did you put it together?

István: I wrote the album for my two little daughters, and I wanted serious, mature women to sing to them about the feelings of serious, mature women. I wrote it on ancient analog instruments and drum machines, and only after the vocal tracks were finished did the songs go into a modern studio, and even there I only added to them. The result turned out very authentic and refined. A true underground success album.

Q: Meanwhile, you this year released a new First Aid 4 Souls album as well. What would you like to say about the record “Totems In A Field Of Pain”?

István: ‘The Paradox of Liberation: From Pavlov to Foucault’.

One of the important starting points of the materialist picture of modern humans is the realization that a large part of our behavior stems from biological, psychological and social influences. Pavlov’s physiological research showed that there is a close connection between the nervous system and behavior: certain stimuli can trigger learnable reactions. Later behaviorism carried this thought further and increasingly interpreted human behavior as a conditionable system. The problem becomes truly interesting when we connect all this with the functioning of society.

Marx interpreted the human being primarily as a social being: our thinking and life possibilities are determined by material and social relations. Foucault, by comparison, examined how social institutions and discourses create categories by which a person is regarded as normal or abnormal, healthy or sick, acceptable or deviant.

One of Foucault’s most important insights is precisely that power does not work only through prohibition. It categorizes, observes, normalizes, and over time the individual begins to monitor themselves according to these norms. Here, however, a paradox appears.

What happens when new and newer identity categories are born from a philosophy of dismantling categories? Certain currents of contemporary identity politics, starting from Foucault’s ideas, rightly question the earlier, stigmatizing social categories. At the same time, liberation itself can also create new categories: new identities, new community boundaries, new moral hierarchies.

Thus a peculiar turn can occur: after the old categories are dismantled, new categories appear which over time can play just as strong an identity-defining role as those we originally wanted to dismantle.

‘Insofar as social progress depends on science, specialized ‘experts’ and uncontrollable market exchange relations, the propertyless, lay citizen (citoyen) necessarily loses his autonomy. The logic of progress artificially maintains the privileges of experts, while the lay masses become vulnerable in the process and lose their autonomy’. We can call this the paradox of liberation.

The question is not whether a formerly stigmatized identity deserves respect. Of course it does. The question is rather whether social acceptance necessarily goes hand in hand with the emergence of a new identity hierarchy.

A transgender person, for example, can be a fully autonomous and free individual, but a bodily or identity change in itself does not answer the philosophical question of freedom. Physiological change and existential freedom are not the same concept. Likewise, belonging to a sexual minority or another identity group does not automatically mean greater philosophical freedom.

This matters because we can easily confuse legal, social, bodily and philosophical freedom. But we can just as easily hollow out the concepts of morality, spirituality and love. If the human being appears primarily as the sum of categories, conditionings and power relations, then morality can become mere behavior regulation, spirituality psychological self-interpretation, and love a norm of acceptance. In such a system the question is no longer how we truly turn toward the other person, but whether we use the right language, recognize the right identity, and comply with the expectations of the given community.

Thus love, too, can lose its self-transcending character. Instead of seeing in it the one-time and irreplaceable person of the other, we may easily begin to love a representative of a category, or expect love on the basis of a category. Morality then is not the search for the good but the monitoring of normative compliance. Nor does spirituality necessarily remain a space of inner transformation, repentance, self-surrender or approach to truth, but becomes an identity-signaling and self-affirming practice.

This hollowing out is especially dangerous because from the outside it looks like liberation. The system rejects the old constraints but creates new ones in the process: it prescribes not what we should believe but how we should speak; not whom we should love but in what form we must express our love; not how we should live morally but which moral positions we must publicly represent.

The real philosophical question is deeper than this: can a person define themselves without becoming the prisoner of some ready-made identity category, and can they relate to the other in such a way that love is not mere social duty but genuine personal turning-toward?

This point also allows an interesting critique of Foucault’s own thinking. For if we examine every act of categorization as a form of power, then the new identity-political categorization itself should be subjected to the same critique.

Otherwise all that has happened is that the old normative system has been replaced by a new one, while behind the moral language the good has disappeared, behind spirituality transcendence, and behind love the real person of the other.

Art is an interesting counterexample to this. The artist is not simply the product of a social category. The creator is able to bring into being a form that did not exist before. Environment, biology, memory and social experience are of course all present in them, yet creation still brings forth new meaning.

The same question appears in conversion. Neurologically, brain processes, neuroplasticity, the rearrangement of memory and changes in emotional processing can be described. But describing them does not necessarily exhaust what a person experiences as conversion. The description of a nervous process is not necessarily identical to understanding the meaning of the event. Conversion is not merely the adoption of a new identity, but can also be the realization that a person does not draw their ultimate value from themselves, and that moral life is not merely adaptation to social expectations but a response to a truth and love greater than oneself.

Therefore, at the end of the path of thought leading from Pavlov to Foucault, perhaps the most important question is not whether ‘we are biorobots’.

But rather this: if a person truly lives among biological and social determinations, are they nevertheless able to reinterpret themselves, and are they able to find their way back to the true content of morality, spirituality and love?

If they are, then freedom does not necessarily mean the complete absence of determination. It may rather mean the ability to recognize our own conditioning, reflect on it, and, to a certain extent, give it a new direction. This new direction, however, cannot be exhausted by adopting a new identity. It must include responsibility, self-restraint, attention to the other, and also the possibility that a person not merely express themselves but also give themselves away.

In this sense, the artist, the philosopher and the convert may be three different manifestations of the same human possibility: not simply suffering what the world has made of them, but trying to create something new out of themselves, and in doing so rediscovering that the ultimate meaning of human freedom is not the limitlessness of self-definition, but free openness to truth, to the good, and to the other person.

Q: What else would you like to achieve, and above all create, as a musician? And what would be your ultimate dream?

István: There are still a few icons in my life whom I respect to the extreme. With them I’d like to make the second part of the duology, the male album. Names have said yes that even I can hardly believe. My ultimate dream? To wake up.

About István Gazdag

István Gazdag is a Hungarian Electronic musician, producer and composer based in Budapest. He started out in the mid-1980s with Vacuum, a Dark-Electro/EBM project influenced by Cabaret Voltaire, Yello and Skinny Puppy. Vacuum later evolved into Vacuum (X), a multi-disciplinary project that combines electronic composition with contemporary poetry.

Gazdag’s main outlet is First Aid 4 Souls, blending Industrial, Dark-Electro and EBM. The project signed to Belgian label Alfa Matrix in August 2019 with a label-debut EP, followed by the album “Keep This World Empty”. “Fire”, released in June 2020, paid tribute to the Hungarian subculture community LD50.hu, and the “Dreambox” EP followed that October. The album “I Am The Night” arrived in May 2022, and 2023 brought the EP/mini-album “Dancing At The Abyss”, the EP “Laudator Temporis Acti” and the 70-track back-catalogue compilation “This Present Darkness”.

In December 2025, First Aid 4 Souls released the post-punk and darkwave-leaning album “Progenitrix”, built around a cast of guest female vocalists the project calls “Divas Of The Dark”. The latest First Aid 4 Souls album, “Totems In A Field Of Pain”, followed via Alfa Matrix on 26 June 2026.

Gazdag also records as First Aid Tech, a more dance-oriented outlet that released its debut EP in December 2023, and as Stahlgeist, an old-school EBM project that signed to Alfa Matrix in October 2022 with an alternate version of the album “Escape Reality”; Stahlgeist is currently on hold. Beyond his own projects, Gazdag has remixed material for Coil, Soft Cell, Test Dept., Cabaret Voltaire and Einstürzende Neubauten as a member of the Some Bizzare roster and the UK Musicians’ Union.

Side-Line has interviewed Gazdag’s projects several times, including a 2020 Click Interview with First Aid 4 Souls, a 2022 Click Interview, a First Aid 4 Souls interview in March 2026, a 2023 interview with Stahlgeist and a 2025 interview with First Aid Tech. This latest conversation, courtesy of Inferno Sound Diaries, moves beyond the music to cover Gazdag’s outlook on art, artificial intelligence and Hungary under Viktor Orbán.