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Underworld

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"Hello to you soon"

Location: United Kingdom

Websites:

• http://underworldlive.com
• http://myspace.com/underworld

Bio: An incredible 27 years after their birth in Romford, Essex as a trio and 15 years after they pressed up their debut single, Rick Smith ... (more) and Karl Hyde are still enjoying the ride, grinning like kids as new vistas unfold before them. What has distinguished them over the years is their ability to instill a deep soulfulness and empathetic humanity into even the most anthemic club banger. They fuse together elements of techno, dub, trance, Krautrock, drum ’n’ bass, ambient house and even blues, complementing and contrasting not only sounds, but emotions, too, tying them together with Hyde’s frequently prescient, often opaque but always strikingly poetic lyrics. The colossal ‘Born Slippy’ thus packed a heart-rending existential ache along with that thrilling, jackhammer pulse and – immortalized as it was in Danny Boyle’s Zeitgeist-busting movie ‘Trainspotting’ – became a soundtrack for a generation.

If there’s a single explanation for Underworld’s longevity and fecund creativity, it’s their appetite for change and, over the past years, they’ve been busy breaking acres of fresh artistic ground, much of it in cyberspace. In November 2005, Smith and Hyde launched their digital ‘Riverrun’ project, delivering on-line brand new music direct to their fans, thus short-circuiting the relentless write/record/tour/promote system and allowing them to respond much quicker to their creative moods.

“This renewed vigour we’ve felt in the past four or five years has surfaced in material that hasn’t really appeared over the commercial parapet,” Smith explains, “but what we’re most interested in doing – beyond just ‘Oblivion With Bells’ – is simply marking our ongoing journey. Big conclusions aren’t what we’re aiming for; we’re interested in expressing how we feel at one particular time and that in no way necessarily says that’s where we’re going. It just says that’s where we’re at, at the moment. I do think large aspects of the new album sound like two guys who’ve had great experiences with film music, who have a passion for film and travelling and for ambient, more gentle and perhaps what was less generally understood as ‘an Underworld sound’ – which was uplifting, anthemic, banging and very obviously dance oriented.”

 

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