Early photographs and rare footage of the Romanian group Rodion GA during the 1970s show their founder Rodion Ladislau Roşca to be a handsome, Brando-esque figure in flares eyeing up the lens while shifting amplifiers off a lorry. 50 years later, he continued to flirt with the camera while flipping the switches of his splintered Tesla Sonnet reel-to-reel tape machine at London’s Horse Hospital. Roşca was a revered precursor of avant pop, the Giorgio Moroder of Romania, king of records. The crash, bang, wallop of loop, flange and Doctor Q effects steered Rodion GA’s drum machine and Soviet-made Faemi organ driven sound to a further musical abroad, far from the frilly shirted mainstream dominating the brief period of Romania’s more Western orientated, more ‘liberalised’ domestic policies, which ended after President Nicolae Ceauşescu’s visit to China in 1971. After his return, there followed a total ideological reversal and establishment of brutal Stalinist totalitarianism.

Like many longhairs of the 1970s throughout the former Soviet zones, Roşca received his alt musical schooling in Western pop during the 1960s via Radio Luxembourg, whose signals carried musical forms – subversive R&B, rock ’n’ roll and transgressive fuzz feedback – deemed anathema to the political order of the Soviet Union. While working at a power plant in 1975, he met Gicu Fărcaş and Adrian Căpraru (the G and A of the group) and formed Rodion GA. As others sought out forbidden esoterica like The Yoga Journal (yoga was then classified as forbidden science) or lurked in car parks on the outskirts of Bucharest swapping Western action films smuggled from Budapest, Rosca bought discs from Norway, assembling what was to become a renowned collection of Italo disco, psychedelic and metal by groups such as Dik-Dik, MC5, ELP and Kraftwerk. Following the Romania 1989 revolution/coup that culminated in the overthrow and execution of both Ceaușescu and his wife Elena, satirical pamphlets circulating through the re-emerging counterculture speculated that dossiers stolen from Ceauşescu’s architectural folly the Primaverii Palace revealed that he’d had Little Richard’s “Tutti Frutti” on his mind when he was drafting his infamous July Theses, a 1971 speech announcing new measures and new offensives against non-compliant intellectuals, artists and dissenting others. Others, like Roşca, failed to recant under instruction or go weak at the knees as a supplicant to Ceauşescu’s nightmare vision of socialist ‘engineered soul’. After Ceauşescu’s execution, the unravelling of his personality cult had less to do with samizdat copies of James Joyce’s Ulysses, more to do with pirated VHS copies of Pretty Woman and amped-up Motörhead.

“I contacted unknown tourist groups paying them 20–30 Deutsch Marks to buy albums, then send them to me. It was illegal to contact or talk to foreigners, but I did” – Rodion Roşca

In 2017, carrying an added weight of 1.5kg of abdominal fluid, suffering chronic fatigue and spells of vertigo due to cancer, Roşca adopted the gait of a down-at-toga legislator from the outskirts of the Roman Empire. Picturesque allusions to his innate genius couldn’t hide the fact that his diagnosis of inoperable cancer sharply accentuated his sense of squandered time, having given up music when his beloved mother Rozalia died in 1989. Holed up in Aşchileu Mare, a village 30 kilometres from Cluj, he had built an anti-Gracelands wall around his house as a bulwark against grief and public intrusion, trading in auto parts, repairing motorbikes and advertising himself as a guitar tuner for hire while melding funky and cerebral rhythms on his kitchen table at 3am.

“I had a lot of expensive tools, jig saws and drill machines. I was a man who was working all the time. I built a wall two metres tall, 40 metres width, 25 metres long. I built the biggest wall with metal insertions” – Rodion Roşca

Living among free-ranging animals and 40 years of accumulated debris, including clapped-out computers, voice coils, cones and Tesla wheels, Roşca remained acutely aware of the physical distance between himself and Kraftwerk’s Kling Klang Studio in Düsseldorf and Moroder’s Musicland in Munich. Even though he never shied away from stating his clear musical affinity and his own significance, he was no longer a part of “the action”. A former composer in exile, he easily made it onto the local mayoral list at official functions, weddings and fêtes, but he was never the main attraction. That acclaim came later, once word about Roşca and an astonishing body of music comprising previously unheard home recordings, lost tapes and Casio Tone-induced reverie started leaking out in 2013 via an increasing range of supporters, among them film makers, musicians, DJs and countercultural advocates like Luca Sorin, Ion Dumitrescu of Future Nuggets, Milo Shee of Inverse, former broadcaster, art music producer and friend Andrei Bucureci, sound artist and researcher Richard Crow, Quinton Scott of Strut Records and more recently Mark Stewart of The Pop Group.

“Rodion improvised ways of writing and recording on reel-to-reel using three to four Tesla machines, a raw form of multi-tracking. Drums and guitar on one channel, adding other instruments on the other machines. He made visceral, claustrophobic sounds, a dark romantic utopia completely at odds with the musical and political landscape of the time” – Quinton Scott

In 2017 I visited Roşca to talk about the logistics of his one-off performance in London, he invited me for “some milk to clean the brain” at a roadside cafenea. Between sipping milk and knocking back tzuiki, we arm-wrestled while he told me how longhairs such as himself and officially designated delinquent friends were marked out by freelance zealots of a proletarian cult of traditional values and faux folk music, and others who became snoops for local surveillance units monitoring fax, telex and telephones. When I visited him again a year later, he mapped out his plans for tours to China, Japan and the UK, all the time keeping one eye on the CCTV screen, ever vigilant against local bandits who might try to steal his speakers or the spare parts he kept for his Tesla.

“Rosca was the outsider’s outsider, his was a lucid subversion. Equipped with a new set of ethics and sense of mission and creating jubilant musical manifestos against dominating deadly forces, he stressed that we would not be crushed by a twisted logic. His pride was the mark of a man” – Mark Stewart

Descending from the shuttle bus and arriving in the village, it became obvious that Roşca’s neighbours had become accustomed to seeing carefully dishevelled, slightly intense young men from Bucharest, Berlin or Liverpool carrying sound recording devices, cameras, tripods and vinyl copies of Rozalia or CDs of The Lost Tapes for Roşca to sign. His belated elevated status within the village had, during the early years, been something he literally had to fight for as local roughnecks taunted or took him on as a “weirdo townie”. After he floored a few, he was eventually afforded a respect that was well overdue.

“I need only: a normal table, a 50–55 cm tall chair, a simple 3 cm mixer, a microphone stand and a new liver” – Rodion Roşca

Before his last performance at The Horse Hospital in London in 2018, a video interview at the Romanian Embassy featured Roşca and Stephen Coates, composer/curator of the X-Ray Audio Project. From the upper floor, we heard several doors open, then shut. Finally, he appeared – Roşca was always professionally aware of the significance of an entrance – he made his way gingerly down the staircase, his Tesla B70 close to his chest and carrying a plastic bag containing an assortment of painkillers. On the ground floor, he passed a wall lined with portraits of haughty aristos on horseback, men in frockcoats adopting the pose of Great Official Heroes. The incongruity of the occasion wasn’t clocked by Roşca. Why would it have been? He was busy psyching himself up for his interview with Coates and a photo shoot with the film maker and photographer Paul Heartfield. For younger Romanians, however, there was nothing remotely incongruous. Roşca already was a hero, a legendarui. Following his death, he was even more so. Why wouldn’t his portrait be hung next to Alexandru Ioan Cuza, Prince of Moldova?

“It’s true,” says Andrei Bucureci, head of Transylvanian dub label Sound Of Art To Come, “Roşca was Mr Miyagi for the younger generations of musicians. Upcoming electro musicians and DJs, myself included, found in Rodion a paradoxical mentor. He took great pride in being the only Romanian to create innovative sounds and songs with very few resources.”

For Coates, it was his “sparky experimentation, someone whose radical spontaneity smuggled past the cultural censors beneath a Trojan horse of state-approved poetry with a musical psychedelia bolted together with manly imagination”. A deeply tender cultural hero, a humanist with a mordant wit, his final years saw him finger-click his way back from obscurity to early evening German TV, roped-off VIP booths in converted garages and an increasing army of ‘selfie-with-Rodi’ beatniks and art students. As the main attraction at the Horse Hospital, he closed the evening dressed in a sky blue shell suit behind his beloved Tesla, mixing his analogue classics with new, raw house music, still audacious and recognisable as a sonic whirligig against dismal conformity and dictatorship.

“Playing alongside Rodi was daunting and exciting during his by turns joyous yet painful performance. Meeting him afterwards he appeared shocked by my use and abuse of the reel-to-reel tape recorder. I kept thinking of him as Krapp in Beckett’s Krapp’s Last Tape. One more fragment from another time and a different place. Rodi and tape can be read similarly maybe. The Rodi before me had already gone, already integrated into the tape and that which contained it” – Richard Crow

Since Roşca’s death in March this year, there are plans for an exhibition in the pipeline, an assemblage of a unique archive of podcasts, remixes and captured images in Bucharest and Cluj, no doubt his Tesla B70 contained in a perspex box, like St Thomas’s accusatory finger. I can only hope it stops there with no gaudy statue in Uniris Sqare, Cluj. That would be a personality cult too far.

In 2018, impatient for his newer songs to be heard, to be acknowledged on arrival at London’s Stansted Airport, Roşca forced earphones to my ears, telling me, “Momma, Momma listen!” The song? “Don’t Cry If I Die”.

I did anyway.

[Rodion Roşca’s quotes are unedited SMS messages sent to David Ellis during their collaboration. The recordings of Rodion GA are available via Strut/Future Nuggets/Ambassador's Reception, Inversions and BBE. Rodion, a short film interviewing the musician directed by Quincy Andrews, is available to watch via Vimeo.]