[PODCAST] I thought the underground was something you could hear. Eventually it becomes a festival sound.

For a long time, I thought the underground was something you could hear. I thought it lived in the sound itself….the weight of the low end, the refusal to give you the obvious payoff, the kind of track that made you wait longer than you wanted to wait.

A DJ would hold a room in that uncomfortable space for twenty minutes, maybe longer, without giving people the release they were expecting. And if they were good, eventually the room would understand why. That felt like the underground to me: a certain severity, a willingness to be difficult, a refusal to make everything immediately legible. But the longer I’ve been involved in this, the less useful that definition seems. Because every underground sound eventually becomes a festival sound.

Every severe aesthetic becomes a visual identity, then a dress code, then a marketing campaign. Something that started as a set of cultural conditions becomes a surface. It gets packaged, photographed, and circulated by people who weren’t there for the part that made it meaningful in the first place. And then, once that happens, everyone starts writing about how the underground is dead.

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