17/03/2026
What does "underground" even mean in 2026?
I've been sitting with this question for a while, and I think it's time to say some things out loud.
The same conversation loops back around on social media. The scene is dying. DJs can't mix anymore. It's all about followers now. Sound systems are getting worse. Promoters don't care. The music is watered down. And honestly? Most of these rants have a point. But they almost never go deeper than the symptom. They never touch the root.
If you've been around long enough, you've seen the pattern. A sound emerges from the margins. It's raw, it's exciting, it's built by people who genuinely don't care about commercial viability , they're just following a passion. Then it gets noticed. Then it gets co-opted. Then it gets stripped of everything that made it special and fed to the mainstream as content.
This isn't theory. This is documented history, and it keeps happening.
Look at dubstep. The sound that came out of South London in the early 2000s , Digital Mystikz, Loefah, Kode9, Skream's "Midnight Request Line" , was rooted in dub reggae, UK garage, and a very specific South London energy. Dark rooms, heavy sub-bass, meditative half-time rhythms. By 2010, Skrillex had taken the tempo and the name and turned it into something unrecognizable. "Scary Monsters and Nice Sprites" won Grammys. The brostep explosion that followed was so far removed from the original that pre-2010 dubstep fans had to start clarifying which dubstep they were into. Artists who had built scenes in corners of London and Bristol watched their sound get turned into the musical equivalent of a monster truck rally. Meanwhile, the originators , Mala, Pinch, the Deep Medi crew , just kept doing their thing in smaller rooms.
Look at Tech House. The genre was born in London's mid-90s club scene , Terry Francis, Mr C, Nathan Coles , blending the precision of Detroit techno with the groove of House. Stripped back, hypnotic, designed for dark rooms and long sets. Fast forward to 2018: Fisher's "Losing It" explodes, racks up hundreds of millions of streams, and suddenly "Tech House" means punchy, aggressive, vocal-chop-driven festival bangers built for TikTok clips and mainstage LED walls. Chris Lake, John Summit, the Dirtybird wave , what they're doing sounds nothing like what Tech House meant in 2005. The underground sound got its name hijacked by the mainstream and most people don't even know it happened.
And now look at what's happening with Afro house and amapiano. Sounds that grew out of township parties in South Africa, deeply rooted in local communities, are now being picked apart for "exotic" samples by producers who couldn't point to Soweto on a map. The IMS Business Report confirms it , these genres are climbing streaming charts faster than ever. But who benefits? And does the mainstream version carry any of the cultural weight of the original?
This is the cycle. Rinse and repeat. But here's the part that should be impossible to miss: every single one of these sounds — dubstep, tech house, amapiano — was born underground. The mainstream didn't create any of them. It just showed up after the hard work was done, took what it wanted, and repackaged it. If you only pay attention to the mainstream, you'd think each wave appears out of nowhere and then dies. You'd miss the fact that the underground never went away , it just stopped being visible to people who weren't looking. And yet, it's the source of everything they're consuming.
The underground is not a basement. It's soil.
This is where most people get it wrong, and I think it's the single biggest misunderstanding about what "underground" means.
Too many people are stuck on the aesthetic. The gritty warehouse. The illegal location. The dark room with a haze machine and a single red light. Don't get me wrong , that imagery exists for a reason. Early raves happened in abandoned warehouses and industrial spaces because they were functional and cheap, not because anyone was chasing an aesthetic. The money went into the sound system, not the decor. When Heart Beat was throwing techno parties in Saigon in the early 2010s, they weren't worried about Instagram-worthy production design. They were worried about navigating complex licensing requirements, making the economics work in a city where most people had never heard of Berghain, and building an audience from scratch.
But the warehouse aesthetic is the cover, not the book.
The underground, as a concept, makes far more sense as a metaphor for soil , the environment where seeds germinate. It's dark, unseen, unglamorous. But it's where everything grows before it breaks the surface.
Every major movement in electronic music started underground , house in Chicago's Black and q***r communities, techno in Detroit's post-industrial landscape, jungle and drum & bass in London's Afro-Caribbean neighbourhoods. None of these started as commercial propositions. They started as creative responses to specific conditions, built by people who had something to say and no mainstream platform to say it on.
That's what underground means. Not a location. Not a dress code. Not a price point. It's the conditions under which genuine creativity happens , when you're free from commercial pressure, from algorithms, from the expectation of virality.
So when someone asks "does the underground still exist?" , of course it does. As long as people are making new sounds with no guarantee anyone is listening, the underground exists. The question isn't whether it's alive. The question is whether you're paying attention.
Here's where I'm going to step on some toes.
To this day, the general public has almost no understanding of what a DJ actually does. And honestly, a big part of the scene doesn't help.
Think about how other musicians earn respect. A drummer sits behind a kit and you can see the physical exertion. The sweat. The coordination. The hours of practice are obvious. The audience can see the craft because the suffering is visible.
A DJ stands behind a table. From the outside, it looks like they're checking email. The craft is invisible.
And here's the thing most people don't realise: DJs were never meant to be the visual focus. The entire culture was built around being heard, not seen.
At the Warehouse in Chicago, Frankie Knuckles played from a booth on the middle floor — the crowd came for the music, not to watch him work. At the Paradise Garage in New York, Larry Levan's booth overlooked the dancefloor from above; his connection with the crowd was sonic, almost telepathic, not visual. David Mancuso's Loft was the same — it was about the sound system, the records, and the shared experience. Unless a DJ is a turntablist — someone like Q-Bert or DJ Shadow physically manipulating vinyl as a performance art — there's genuinely not much to look at.
And that was the point. The music was the show. The dancefloor was the stage. Somewhere along the way, we flipped that completely, and now we've got DJs centre-stage behind pyrotechnics, performing for cameras instead of ears. We turned a listening experience into a spectator sport, and then we wonder why nobody understands the craft.
But here's what the audience doesn't see: the thousands of hours spent listening , not casual listening, but active, obsessive listening. The years spent learning how to read a room , understanding that the energy at 1am is fundamentally different from 4am, that the crowd in front of you is a living organism you have to respond to in real time. The hundreds of gigs in empty rooms with bad monitors and broken equipment, where you learned more about your craft than any packed festival set would ever teach you. The financial reality of spending more on music than you'll ever earn from playing it. The decades of crate digging , whether in record shops or endless Bandcamp scrolls , building a library that IS your instrument.
And then there's the selector dimension that almost nobody talks about. A great DJ isn't a jukebox. They're a curator, a storyteller, a translator between the music and the moment. The ability to find, identify, and contextualise music , that's artistry. But you can't put it on a poster. You can't make a TikTok of someone thinking deeply about track sequencing.
And because the craft is invisible, the door is wide open for everyone to call themselves a DJ. Which brings me to the next problem.
Everyone is a DJ. Everyone is a promoter. Nobody has a clue.
You've seen it. I've seen it. Especially in Southeast Asia, where the scene is young and growing fast.
Someone buys a controller, beat matches instantly thanks to Auto-Sync, builds a following on Instagram, and suddenly they're a DJ! On the other side of the same coin , someone with money and connections decides they're a "promoter," books a venue, slaps together a lineup with no curatorial vision, charges premium prices, cuts corners on sound, and calls it a rave. No ethos. No understanding of the scene they're profiting from. No commitment beyond the next event's bottom line.
In Vietnam specifically, the underground electronic scene has had to fight this battle from the beginning. When Heart Beat, and later collectives like Nhạc Gãy were building something real in Saigon, the odds were stacked against them , a complex regulatory environment, a mainstream market dominated by Vinahouse at 150 BPM, and a nightlife economy that for years prioritised headliner-driven bookings over nurturing a local ecosystem.
I say this as a foreigner who has been part of this scene , many of us genuinely love the culture and want to contribute to it. But the structural problem remains: for too long, the model was built around importing talent rather than developing it. The result was a scene where local artists struggled to get meaningful platforms in their own city, and the few underground events that existed often felt disconnected from the broader Vietnamese community.
The good news is that this is changing. Collectives driven by Vietnamese artists and diaspora communities are reclaiming the narrative, and audiences are following. But the shift didn't happen by accident , it happened because people insisted on it.
And this pattern plays out across the region. In Bali, the electronic music scene has always been driven by the tourist economy, with little connection to local culture. In Bangkok, you have legitimate underground spaces like 12x12 and Elswhere doing incredible work, but they exist alongside a massive commercial circuit that couldn't care less about the music. The imbalance between people building scenes out of passion and people exploiting scenes for profit is staggering.
The saturation of low-quality events doesn't just annoy people who know better , it actively damages the ecosystem. When someone's first "rave" experience is a badly promoted party with terrible sound and no sense of community, they walk away thinking that's what electronic music is. And you've lost them…
The headwinds are real, but so is creativity.
I'm not going to pretend this is easy. Clubs are closing worldwide. Berlin's techno scene, long held up as the gold standard, is increasingly becoming a tourist attraction rather than a living culture. Berghain's own regulars say the post-COVID reality has changed. Even UNESCO recognition of Berlin's techno heritage feels like a beautiful eulogy more than a lifeline.
Streaming algorithms push what's already popular. Social media rewards spectacle over substance. Festival economics demand bigger names and bigger productions, squeezing out the experimental and the weird. The music business remains as unforgiving as ever , maybe more so, because now you're competing not just with other artists but with an infinite content feed.
But here's what I keep coming back to: the underground has always faced headwinds. It's not supposed to be easy or comfortable or profitable. It's where people end up when they care more about the music than the business. Not because they chose it , but because what they do doesn't fit anywhere else. And those people still exist.
In Saigon, Nhạc Gãy taught themselves to DJ with no role models and no DJ academy. They built a q***r-friendly, Vietnamese-identity-first collective that blends gabber, traditional instruments, and breakbeats , and in doing so showed that Vietnamese electronic music doesn't have to be a carbon copy of European rave culture. In Seoul, clubs like Cakeshop have been exporting Korean takes on house and techno across the world. Independent labels like Shall Not Fade in the UK, Razor-N-Tape in New York, and countless others keep pressing records that prioritise artistry over algorithms.
The creative lab is still running. The seeds are still germinating. You just have to get below the surface to find them.
I'm not writing this to complain. I'm writing this because I think the conversation needs to shift.
Stop mourning some imagined golden age. The underground was never comfortable, never easy. If you're looking for the underground and can't find it, the problem might be where you're looking.
Stop equating the underground with poverty aesthetics. A well-run event with good sound in a beautiful space can be just as underground as a warehouse party. What matters is the intent, the curation, the respect for the music and the community , and above all, the creativity.
Start supporting the people who are doing the work. Go to the small events. Buy music from independent labels. Follow the selectors, not just the headliners. And if you're a promoter, put the sound system budget before the LED wall budget.
… And stop conflating Instagram followers with artistic credibility.
The underground isn't dying. It's just underground. That's the whole point.
Patrick S
