Long Live the Underground.

LONG LIVE THE UNDERGROUND.

The avant-garde. The fringe. The edges. The unknown and as-yet unspoken. The emerging and the fiercely passionate.

Everything meant for mass appeal must be watered down. Made digestible. Politically correct. Carefully constructed.

Slowly, the soul is carved out, like gutting fish.

Substance dilutes into empty structure—made suitable for mass production. The handiwork, the art, the heart bleeding dry.

Only the underground is pure; or dirty, depending on your viewpoint. Organic, chaotic, dusty, disorganized, dangerous, potent.

The mainstreaming process is surgical neutering. Where sterility, 'purity', and no-sharp-corners reign as supreme virtues.

Only the underground is born out of the raw, unfiltered chaos of reality—the very stillpoint of creation.

The origin-moment of consciousness manifesting itself from the void, pulling fantasy into reality, where the seed of divine inspiration first weaves its roots into reality.

It’s not understood. Nor well defined. It’s fragile, yet unstoppable. It’s felt but not yet named. Envisioned but not yet created. Certainly not universally palatable. 

GOOD.

• Underground warehouse gatherings in the early days of the American dubstep scene—a hyper-experimental fusion of digital sound design and soundsystem construction in symbiotic co-creative evolution. Now, festival culture dominates North American summers, fueled by the Funktion-One & PKSound sonic alchemy refined in these early days.
• Taoism took its first steps in the late-night, plum wine-infused gatherings of the artist-intellectuals in the Dark Enigma Movement. Simple gatherings chasing the dragon of natural philosophy and pure artistry, slowly growing into one of the most beautiful philosophical movements in history.
• The amount of Western culture quietly constructed in the first English coffee shops casts a grand shadow today. They were a proto-internet, where information was freely shared and new cultural, political, and economic movements were founded. Caffeine & coffeeshops contributed much to the Western.
• Underground renegade chemists crafted novel psychedelic compounds and rogue therapists pioneered new paradigms throughout the 50's/60's. And now, eager fools like me can stand on the shoulders of giants and learn the art and science of psychedelic therapy.

All of it is gritty. Messy. Ugly. Full of mistakes and casualties of the cause. Organic and wholly natural. Naturally unrestrained.

It’s not for everyone.

It’s not for the culture, because it’s not yet in the culture. 

It's not for the money. The easily corrupting forces of finance, marketing, PR-speak, & corporate politics have not yet entered these hallowed halls. It's a ritual investment, a blood sacrifice of human biology bootstrapping proto-life into being with time, energy, love, and attention.

It’s for the art. For the first-movers, visionaries, mad scientists, self-experimenters, renegades, and early-adopters. Those who self-select, with no promise of fame or recognition. There because they want to be—have to be—their soul beckoning them to the edges of emergence and the adjacent possible. 

While it remains many innovators' goal to break into the light of mass culture—as they are right to do—you will not find me there.

Seek me out in the back of the library, the dim corner of the tea shops, deep in the dusty archives, candlelit huts in the jungle, down in the warehouse district—playing in the mud where the lotus first takes root.

For I seek something I cannot name...

That spark of unfiltered genius. The final dance with madness. Mainlining a moment of profound inspiration. The creative and vital force of Life infusing the room, and you know you have just experienced something of great significance—found a seed destined for the light.

"Sorry man, I can't explain it, you just had to be there."

LONG LIVE THE UNDERGROUND.
EB.