You have lived in a lot of different places travelling around the world and lived in a lot of different cities. Could you tell us a bit more about this parcours? 

Marina I moved away from my home country in 2022 and ended up in Belgium in 2024. It was quite a journey because in that period I lived in Armenia, Georgia, Romania, Italy, and Germany. It was a very nomadic period where I didn’t know what was going to happen in a window of three months, because that was how long the Visa usually allowed me to stay in one place legally. Armenia was the first place to completely change my whole vision of the world, because on paper I was supposed to adapt to the new culture quite quickly. But it proved to be quite a challenging adaptation period in fact although I eventually found my place through music and all the people in the music-scene there. But once I crossed this first hurdle moving to the other countries afterwards felt easier.

It’s only when I arrived in Belgium and I had a prospect to be able to stay here long-term that I realized how much I missed the feeling of a house where you can stay as long as you want. 

How has all this travelling/living in different places impacted your musical tastes? 

Marina I think that it definitely influenced my musical taste, but it’s hard to explain just exactly how. I spent the most time in Armenia and Georgia and in Georgia I was going quite often to a club called Left Bank. The whole idea and concept behind this club is the closest to what I would describe as my own personal dream club. I feel like Georgian nightlife and culture in general is very political and the young generation there is very active and militant. That's mainly the reason why I really felt connected to this space and other spaces like Mutant Radio because nothing is taken for granted there. It was great to witness lots of creative processes shaping up in these environments.

It was a sharp contrast with Armenia, where there are not a lot of physical places left where the electronic music community can go. I was always in the art circles and often we would hang out at a friend’s studio. There we’d go "What is the sexiest or funniest and etc. track?" and we would go around the room and play the tracks out from YouTube until the sunrise. It was a great way to spend the time and get to know new stuff. I felt Armenians also love drum and bass so I really got deeper into that sound as well over there. Their national currency is Dram! We made jokes around it sometimes like adding to the amount of money not Dram, but Dram’n’bass. ‘I’ve got 1500 dram’n’bass for a gig today etc.’’ 

One big conclusion that came out of my ‘nomadic period’ is that, in each place I stayed, I met the local people of the electronic music scene quite fast through the passion of music. It’s often these small pockets in the scene that hang around together and if you’re introduced to the right people you get around very fast through the common language of music. 

How did it after that whole period feel to finally settle down here in Brussels?  

Marina I came several times to Brussels before settling here and I'm still integrating I would say. I'm going to Dutch classes right now and I also started understanding the politics and the really complex bureaucracy of Belgium a bit better. But I’m slowly getting closer to finding my friend-group and everything is going well now. I found my place for weird curations at microwave.radio thankfully to their team and received invitations to play at the cool local parties. It feels really natural and still, a bit unreal to me…

When I came here at first, it was a little bit scary but I was quite lucky because as soon as I got here, I also got an invitation from Kiosk Radio to become a resident, which was also a very big motivation for me to stay and to continue what I'm doing. So I actually am very thankful to Kiosk because they kind of grabbed me from a very chaotic moment in life and they gave me a space that felt like home to express my love for music as well. 

Additionally, no•id  helped me a lot to integrate into the current scene, and some promoters like grid.avi at first invited me to play during my Europe trip and then quickly became part of my friend group as well.

Let’s go back to the beginning: What was your parcours in music? 

Marina I have a classical education, I'm originally a pianist and choreographer. I think lots of people who went through this type of classical education will understand me when I say that it's a very difficult environment to thrive in artistically: you are surrounded by all these ‘geniuses’ of music and the pressure is always high. If you're playing Mozart or Beethoven you are always overthinking like "Okay, how can I even think of myself as a composer in the light of all this greatness?” Teachers at my school and academy were really demanding and now, I wouldn’t really consider this education for my future kids even though I think this high pressure way of studying was quite profitable in the end. 

I’ve always fought this constant desire to do something professionally in music because of the classic poor artist stigma: especially in my home-country, Russia, if you are an artist it’s perceived as if you just don’t have a job at all. Parents are so afraid of these career paths as well and I feel that this fear translates into your own personality as well: I didn't listen to the music for two years after graduating because I was so traumatized. I just wanted to explore other artforms after this because I just felt so overwhelmed by the whole experience. But at the same time I don’t regret anything, it was just my path and I also understand why my parents were afraid of me going into the arts, it’s not as supported and stable as some other sectors.

I am actually very thankful to my first teacher for piano. Her name is Svetlana Avenirovna and she always believed in me and the result is that now, when I’m producing or mixing, this classical back-ground pays off. I don’t remember all the academic theory and literature so well, but it is always somewhere in the unconscious part of the brain. Like when I’m in the studio with my husband Laurens and he's surprised that I get down some compositional challenges quite quickly. 

And after that whole parcours in classical music when did you decide that you wanted to become a DJ? 

Marina In my second year at university I loved the club scene and because I felt I didn’t have a lot of friends it also motivated me to go out and try new stuff. I found some friends there and then I met even more people like the Esthetic Joys collective. With them I also started organizing and helping with the parties and just hanging out and I picked up a lot of music from them. My  friend Yssue, also showed me so much cool stuff. I got into IDM through him. I was like 21-22 and I started digging and it felt so exciting to find all this. From checking the interviews of Mike Paradinas or trying to find out who Burial you know… It is in this phase that I discovered labels like Underground Resistance, Planet Mu, R&S, art-tek(90s Russian IDM), Hyper-Dub and artists like Björk, Valentina Magaleti, Justin Broadriks, Mark van Hoen, Aphex Twin and many more. So I was constantly educating myself and nerding about the music. 

Then one day a guest DJ didn’t show up to play a set and since your friends know your taste they were like: you should do it. But I didn't think of myself as a DJ at that time but gradually more bookings came in and I got my first booking in the club but I didn’t even have a name yet. So I decided on Casper and just went for it and here we are all those years later. Now with its ups and downs, I've been DJing at the club environments for around 6 years and I must admit, I love it.

You recently also released some music: is that something you want to focus more on?

Marina I don't know actually. To be very honest, I'm still producing a lot of stuff at the moment but I just don't like the tracks that I have right now. I think for now I will keep producing more as a hobby so that I don’t put too much pressure on it as well. I have friends who wake up and the first thing they do is start producing because they feel that's how the professional producers work. I’d like to avoid this. In general I would like to evolve more to being a multidisciplinary music artist: with a combination of curating, DJ’ing and producing. 

I want to avoid being framed just as a DJ or a producer or even just purely a music selector because I think that in general, selection also includes your whole vision on the scene and how you partake in it. I really love the fact that I can show my selection through assembling the programme for the ghost club show on Kiosk. I am aiming to invite as many people as possible that resonate with me musically but who also have a similar vision on music in general. That’s really important to me, to ‘build a world’.

How do you feel about having to be “chronically online” to promote your DJ-stuff/producer stuff? 

Marina I was chronically online when I was younger as I’m an early zoomer. I didn't have that many friends and for me the internet was at first some sort of a way to escape my daily reality. At some moment I even became a bit popular on the internet because of my interest in making and editing videos and I was also doing a lot of modeling. I was posting all this out in the open on the internet and I used Instagram as sort of a diary. This is however a part of me that died when I moved out of my home country because I realized that behind this whole social media phenomenon there is quite a big problem with sharing a lot of your personal life with people you don't know. When I left my home country this was just something that I wasn’t looking for anymore.

Right now I feel like social media is quite a big obstacle: it’s this constant feeling of having to post something or nobody will know about it. I would like to live in a world where people actually have real life connections again but I understand that it has just become part of our life. I just try to be creative with it and don’t care too much about the algorithms behind it. I don't want to become just another DJ on Instagram: I would like to have some fun with it all and not take this part of the industry too seriously. 

I guess the previous questions also ties in with your job at C12, where you manage the communication and the socials. How do you like that job? 

Marina I’ve been working there since September 2025 and it was a very nice place to land. It’s a very friendly and community-centered atmosphere to work in: the structure is very horizontal and everybody actually just tries to make this place better.  This is to me the main ingredient of running a good business. In general, I feel like the club has quite a young aura around it and with the communication I wanted to get back to this connection with the younger generation. I strongly feel that everyone who is involved in the club-scene, including the dancers, the clubbers, the people who just come to check everything out, they all take part in it. With the communication my goal is to bring this back to the forefront as well. Everybody should feel welcome but it’s also the responsibility of the clubbers to make it a great night. 

You also run Ghost Club: maybe let’s start off with what it is exactly and where the name came from? 

Marina. So the name is pretty straightforward: Ghost Club was actually born from the fact that I'm Casper, and Casper is a ghost. The name Casper is linked to my older brother: when he moved out I lived in his room and my mom just kept all of his stuff for me. That's how it works in families with brothers and sisters I guess. So I was laying on the bed with his bedsheets of Casper The Ghost on it and I connected with my brother because I know that it was his favorite movie. This must have made a strong subconscious connection when I was thinking of a DJ name Casper just popped up. It also helped that I was blonde at the time so it all just clicked. 

Ghost Club is also linked to the moment I moved here: I went to the place called Abbaye de la Cambre which is very eerie and beautiful and I thought: If I would ever have a party concept myself this is where I would do it. I mean that in a parallel universe type of way of course because you would never be able to throw a party there but this was again a moment that just felt very strong to me. 

What's the concept behind Ghost Club? 

It is kind of the umbrella for my various creative outlets if you will. With Ghost Club in general I’m mostly trying not to connect it too much with any specific styles or bpms of music. I don’t want to influence people's idea of what they can expect from the concept. For example with the mix-series ‘ghost clubx’ I run I want guest-dj’s to make a mix of the music they want to listen to in a club that is no longer there or a mix consisting of producers that are no longer with us, that have become ghosts in the literal way or anything else coming to their mind when they imagine actual ghost club environment. Storylines in the sets are really important for me though.

Ghost Club was also born from the idea of the “death of the small egos”. Since I lost some parts of me in my home country and then in every country along the way, I think Ghost Club is also about that. Like for example as a DJ when you choose to risk everything and play something less convenient for the crowd: some part of your ego also dies in a way. But these small ego deaths also make you feel very alive, you know. My dream is to invite as many ghosts as possible to the ghost feast. I would say, CCL, mad miran, Oko Dj or Miss Kittin could be nice examples of ghosts.

Very interesting take indeed! What’s coming up in the coming months? 

Marina I have a very fun month coming up: I’m playing at Horst again on the Kiosk Radio stage which I’m absolutely looking forward to and warming up before CCL at C12. I also have some really nice and interesting guests coming up on ghost club at Kiosk: In April it will be a live show with a very popular Ukrainian singer who has gone low-key right with a secret project and in May I also have Tasha from Neighborhood London playing. I’ve already prepared the concept and lineup for the first ghost club night in Brussels, soon I will share the date, so keep up with @ghost_clubbing page.