Jeremy Underground: Sonic Archaeology and the Subterranean

by Edward Wright, with notes from Cindy Li and Cameron Lee

Where is Jeremy's underground? In a world in which dark spaces are relentlessly illuminated, where does the underground exist? Where is the darkness when everyone has a flashlight?

Jeremy's underground is in the unearthed past. It is in the lost recordings, the misfits and the forgotten inscriptions of an earlier age. The killer tracks that laid dormant until a middle-aged Parisian decided to take them for a dance.

It is easy to scoff at the past. Retro-mania and nostalgia are ubiquitously trafficked throughout dance music cultures. But Jeremy's position is sincere. His appeal is not in fetishizing anachronisms, but celebrating the past for its relevance and premonition. Here, the past provides a repository for the raw sonic materials that have since been dispersed throughout contemporary aesthetics, moving well beyond the callous simulacrums that inundate Beatport and Friday night playlists at wine bars. Indeed, there is a sense of romanticization. And why shouldn't there be? What else can motivate an attempt to harness the affective source code of a genre?

The speed in which we overturn, consume and dispose is increasingly rapid. The ironic gestures that meditate on these themes offer no more than fleeting relief. This can encourage pessimism, and in some cases, it's warranted. But it can also push us to dig and excavate. It can motivate us to look for what we want not in the new, nor in the next, but in that which we have once passed over. In many cases the sounds we are looking for most likely already exist; it's just up to us to find them.

Digging is often a solitary endeavour. However, when we dig we situate ourselves not just within a continuum of style, but inside larger sub-cultures bound together by taste, temperament, and disposition. Despite what your nihilistic college roommate argued, aesthetics still have ethics, and the way in which we collectively curate and engage the past asserts agency and the sovereignty of sub-culture. Sharing what we unearth becomes more than just a pissing contest. It becomes the way we strengthen and reaffirm the possibility for alternative aesthetics, and in turn, politics.

The word urtext is thrown around a lot in classical music. It refers to an original score that preserves the truthful and authentic intentions of a composer. Derived from the German prefix (ur), meaning original, the word implies that a musical text can possess and maintain fidelity. Urtext within the context of dance music is a bit more ambiguous. With reissues, edits, and bootlegs, the historicity of a dance track can often become lost. Yet when we dig through dusty old boxes, getting leg cramps from crouching too long, are we not on some level searching for ur-recordings, records that simultaneously crystallize and re-define a genre's truthful intentions?

As a selector, Jeremy pushes us towards the ur-recordings of house music. Reminding us that in some old record shop or your aunt's basement there remains a stack of musty records that are bursting with fidelity, earnestness, and an emotional directness that radically departs from the cynical facsimiles that have flooded the contemporary market. Jeremy reminds us why we dig, why we listen, and why we ever gave a shit in the first place. He reminds us that beneath a world of turquoise-tinted glass and generic "deep-house" there still remains the possibility for sincerity.