There is a movement afoot in the underground music scene, as always shifting and transient, staying one move ahead of where you think it is at. Underground 'dance' music of all varieties, and the musics which span off from the initial impulse within the core of the dance music events, the people that attended them, and the work and lives of those people, always contained a core of something 'beyond' the ordinary notions of what a music 'scene' was about.
Many of the producers and labels now putting out their music are managing to combine sound with ideas in refreshingly new ways. One of the ways in which this has begun to take shape is through the freeflow of exchange and networking that takes place on the internet and through the facilitation of free downloadable music. In this, now quite commonplace, activity is something much more profound: a radical new way of understanding how media and formats of media distribution are involved with how we create, listen, live.
The sorts of things that I used to write about in the pages of XLR8R Magazine back in the mid to late 1990s, when things were still much more rooted in a specific kind of dance/electronic music scene geared around traditional entertainment models, have now begun to change. It should be possible to see now what was only a possibility back then.
Although much of the work in my academic papers is extremely technical, it is a part of the more general expansion of the whole ethos of the underground culture to have such forms of expression, and which have a strong overlap with various kinds of research going on in more traditional disciplines. If underground artists wish to make an impact such interaction is also necessary.**
