WHAT IS THE UNDER?

It’s 7 in the morning. I’m sweating my ass off and my bottle of water is empty, again. We are all dancing—or just moving—frenetically, and the bass rumbles inside my ears.

It’s dark. It’s dirty. It’s tekno with a K, as Delia calls it.

My mind wanders off.

If there is such a thing as “under,” is this it? This music, these people, this space?

What even defines something as underground?

Does it even exist?

I recall that night, that feeling that told me: “If there is something called under, then this must be it.”

So, what made that night feel so under?

From my experience, when people talk about the underground scene, they often talk about the upbringing of the artist. There seems to be this idea that someone rich could never truly be under, no matter if they have almost no followers, no fans, no recognition at all. But I think that is a very narrow definition.

In fact, that night I wasn’t even thinking about the DJ when these questions struck me.

It had more to do with the secrecy of it all.

You arrive at a dark, anonymous street. You knock on the door of a small old house. Inside there are barely any lights. There’s even a “dark room” where the bathroom is supposed to be. As far as I know, almost everything about this is illegal—or at least exists somewhere outside the normal infrastructure of nightlife. There are restrictions on how late parties can run, permits for selling alcohol, regulations around venues, noise and events.

So there is a legal aspect to the underground, but there is also an architectural one. The feeling of the space itself is important.

I remember another party I went to. This one was literally underground. Even with a couple of big fans running all night, the air wasn’t going anywhere. It was just moving around and around. I was basically inhaling the breath of everyone in that room.

And then there were the walls.

They were wet.

That night felt very under too.

Let’s imagine for a moment that the exact same party took place somewhere else. Same DJs, same music, same people, same clothes—everything stays the same, except for the space. Now we are in an established club: perfectly ventilated rooms, legally licensed, subcontracted security, corporate sponsorship and a giant LED screen.

It doesn’t feel very under anymore, does it?

So maybe there is no single thing that makes something underground. Maybe the underground only emerges through a particular arrangement of things: the music, the people, the space, the architecture, the law, the money, the technology, even the air we are breathing.

Change enough of those relations and, at some point, the underground seems to disappear.

All of this reminded me of Actor-Network Theory. I’m no expert on it, but what I recall is that society is built upon relationships, and those relationships aren’t only human. Objects, technologies, spaces, institutions and even elements of nature participate in these networks too.

In this way of thinking, what we usually consider peripheral things aren’t really peripheral at all. We can’t assume beforehand that the DJ is important while the hot air in the room is just background. Both are actors in the network, affecting other actors and changing what that particular night can become.

The DJ plays the music, but the architecture contains it. The speakers move the air. The law pushes the party behind an anonymous door. The lack of ventilation makes our bodies sweat. The crowd heats the room even further. The room changes how we behave inside it.

None of these things alone is the underground.

But together, somehow, they produce it.

We are moving away from “what is the underground?” and into “how is the underground produced?”

Think about it. The party doesn’t exist isolated in outer space. The DJ needs a promoter or organizer to call them to play; the promoter needs a space; the space needs money; money requires an audience. And the audience is finite. There are only so many people, and there are a lot of parties happening at the same time. Artists and DJs compete for bookings, venues are scarce, and cops and regulations determine which spaces are allowed to exist under the law.

Let’s stop here for a moment, because I think this is extremely important.

Secrecy and scarcity are crucial aspects of the underground.

There is not enough space for everyone.

And maybe this means that artists and DJs shouldn’t aspire to remain underground forever. They have to move—not necessarily abandon the underground, but move through it. An artist can still return, participate, organize, collaborate, play smaller parties and remain connected to the network. But they cannot be its face forever.

Someone has to leave the basement so someone else can enter it.

I think the underground is ephemeral.

It has to move. It has to constantly change. It is always running away from something: away from the law, away from hegemony, away from institutionalization, away from the current sound of the big spaces. The moment one version of the underground becomes established enough to be recognized, reproduced and eventually institutionalized, something else is already forming beneath it.

Maybe that is why defining the underground is so difficult in the first place. Every time we manage to point at it and say, “there it is,” it has already started moving somewhere else.

So when a party becomes very “successful,” moves to a legal venue, improves its sound system, gets sponsors, books bigger artists and attracts a larger audience, at what precise moment does it stop being underground?

And there’s an even more interesting question here: did it betray the underground, or did it do exactly what a healthy underground ecosystem is supposed to produce?

Stagnation might be a bigger threat to the underground than commercialization. If the same DJs, promoters, aesthetics and audiences permanently occupy the scarce spaces designated as underground, then the underground risks becoming a genre, an aesthetic or, even worse, a brand, rather than a space where something NEW can emerge.

This is why I think our obsession with labeling things “underground” can actually be unhealthy for the scene. Once the label becomes something worth protecting, people begin protecting the things associated with it: certain sounds, certain artists, certain venues, certain ways of dressing, certain ways of partying. We start establishing rules about what belongs and what doesn’t.

And, ironically, we stabilize the very thing that was defined by its instability.

So the underground isn’t necessarily running towards obscurity. It’s running from stabilization.

It has to move because its function is not to preserve a particular sound forever. It is to create the conditions from which something else can emerge.

The underground is producing the sound of the future.

So what is so valuable about the underground scene?

There isn’t yet a market telling artists exactly what works, an established audience expecting a particular sound, or a brand identity that has to be maintained. There is less to lose and, because of that, more room to experiment.

The rawer, the better.

But once someone—or something—succeeds, the network starts stabilizing around that node. Other DJs begin to imitate the sound. Promoters know it sells. Audiences know what to expect. Algorithms categorize it. Festivals book it. What was once strange becomes recognizable; what was recognizable becomes reproducible; and what becomes reproducible can eventually become an establishment of its own.

And I don’t necessarily think this is a bad thing.

Maybe this is exactly what is supposed to happen.

The underground will never die. It will just keep moving and mutating. What worries me more is our desire to define it, catch it and preserve it. The moment we decide what the underground is supposed to sound like, look like or behave like, we begin building walls around it. We create expectations. We establish an aesthetic. Eventually, we create another market.

In trying to protect the underground, we might actually be preventing it from doing the thing that makes it valuable in the first place: changing.

Maybe the underground is like a fish moving downstream. It cannot stay where we first found it. It has to follow the river until eventually it reaches the sea. By then we might say that it is no longer underground, that it became too big, too visible, too commercial.

But more fish will come after it.

Nothing will happen, and everything will happen at the same time.

But if the underground depends on scarcity, illegality, unstable spaces, poor commercialization and constant experimentation, then aren’t we perhaps romanticizing poor conditions?

Let’s think again about that party with the recycled air and wet walls. I mean, it sounds very under, but those are also just shitty conditions. Would improving the ventilation make it less authentic? Having emergency exits? Better sound equipment? Proper bathrooms?

These things are valuable in themselves. I hope we are not agreeing that poor ventilation somehow produces better culture, or that a dangerous space is more underground than a safe one. We don’t usually call a nightclub where people get shot “under.” Quite the contrary.

And this reveals another contradiction.

Despite all the material precariousness I’ve been describing, underground spaces can sometimes feel safer than established ones. Not necessarily safer in terms of infrastructure, but socially safer. More tolerant. Less judgmental. Less concerned with how you dress, who you are, who you came with or how you are supposed to behave.

Maybe what we value about the underground is not precarity at all.

Maybe it is permission.

Permission to experiment with music, with aesthetics, with identity, with social relations, with the use of space itself. The absence—or at least weakening—of some of the expectations that govern more hegemonic spaces.

The wet walls were never the point.

We have to be careful not to think about the underground scene in superficial or frivolous ways. The establishment can reproduce the walls, the darkness, the scratched bathrooms, the weak strobe lights and the secret-location marketing. That’s essentially underground as aesthetic.

What is much harder to reproduce is the network itself: a network that genuinely permits things that haven’t yet been stabilized by the larger hegemonic culture.

And maybe this is the closest we have come to finding something constant in the underground: freedom.

Not absolute freedom, of course. The underground has its own hierarchies, gatekeepers, expectations and contradictions. But there seems to be a particular kind of freedom that appears when things haven’t been completely defined yet. Freedom to make the wrong sound. Freedom to dress incorrectly. Freedom to organize a party somewhere that was never supposed to be a club. Freedom to experiment without knowing whether anyone will care. Freedom to fail.

The establishment can reproduce the appearance of that freedom much more easily than the conditions that made it possible.

It can build the wet walls.

It has a much harder time building the unknown.

So what is the big difference between the underground and the establishment, then?

Maybe it comes down to risk—and the ability to afford it.

Established networks accumulate things they need to protect: capital, audiences, reputations, jobs, sponsors, venues, expectations. The bigger the network becomes, the more people depend on it and the more there is to lose when something fails.

A 5,000-person festival can experiment, of course, but experimentation becomes expensive. There are thousands of tickets to sell, artists to pay, workers whose jobs depend on the event, sponsors expecting visibility and an audience that arrived with certain expectations.

A tiny secret party in an old house has much less to protect.

It can book the DJ nobody knows. The DJ can play something nobody has heard before. People might hate it. The party might fail. Maybe fifty people show up instead of a hundred.

And that possibility of failure is precisely what gives the underground some of its freedom.

The underground can afford to be wrong.

The establishment increasingly needs to be right.

Maybe that’s what I was feeling at 7 in the morning, sweating my ass off with an empty bottle of water in my hand. It wasn’t the wet walls, the darkness, the illegality, or even the music itself. It was the feeling that, for a few hours, nobody really cared about what was supposed to happen next.

Eventually, the lights will turn on. The DJ will pack their things. Some artists will move on to bigger clubs, festivals, and audiences. The sound will travel with them, stabilize, become recognizable, and perhaps become part of the establishment itself.

That’s fine.

The underground was never supposed to stay still.

Somewhere else, behind another anonymous door, someone is already getting it wrong.