jmtd → log → 2022 music discovery: Underworld

One of my main musical 'discoveries' in 2022 was British electronic band Underworld.

I’m super late to the party. Underworld’s commercial high point was the mid nineties. And I was certainly aware of them then: the use of “Born Slippy .NUXX in 1996’s Trainspotting soundtrack was ubiquitous, but it didn’t grab me.

In more recent years my colleague and friend Andrew Dinn (with whom I enjoyed many pre-pandemic conversations about music) enthusiastically advocated for Underworld (and furnished me with some rarities). This started to get them under my skin.

It took a bit longer for me to truly get them, though, and the final straw was revisiting their BBC 6 Music Festival performance from 2016 (with “Rez” and it's companion piece "Cowgirl" standing out)

So where to start? There’s something compelling about their whole catalogue. This is a group with which you can go deep, if you wish. The only album which hasn’t grabbed me is “100 days off” and it’s probably only a matter of time before it does (Andrew advocates the Extended Ansum Edition bootleg here). Here are four career-spanning personal highlights:

• Spikee
  

• King of snake
  

• Nylon strung
  

• Seven music drone
  

A very reasonable entry point to their latest sprawling effort, DRIFT, is ricksdubbedoutdrift experience (live in Amsterdam), only £3 on Bandcamp.