Part I

Juanita/Kiteless/To Dream of Love / Banstyle/Sappys Curry / Two Months Off / Crocodile / Beautiful Burnout / Will and Amira [with Gabriel Yared] / Pearl’s Girl / Doot Doot [as Freur]

Part II

Jumbo / Mmm Skyscraper I Love You / Boy, Boy, Boy / Dirty Epic / Cowgirl / Small Conker and a Twix/You Do Scribble / Most ‘ospitable / Born Slippy.NUXX / Please Help Me

DOWNLOAD BOTH PARTS HERE

Underworld is my favorite band.

* After spending the ’80s in struggling new wave bands called Freur and Underworld (the group’s original, more traditional iteration), then taking time off to work with the art and design collective Tomato with whom they are still affiliated, musicians Karl Hyde and Rick Smith hooked up with a much younger DJ named Darren Emerson. Together they created some dance singles under the names Lemon Interrput and Steppin’ Razor, selling them out of the back of a van at gigs. By 1993 they were releasing singles as Underworld again, leading up to their re-debut, 1994’s Dubnobasswithmyheadman.

* Emerson eventually left the band, leaving Hyde and Smith to continue as a duo beginning with 2002’s A Hundred Days Off. After the completion of their most recent album, Oblivion with Bells, DJ and frequent Underworld remixer Darren Price joined the group for their live performances, which are heavily improvisatory. I guess they like Darrens.

* Hyde, the band’s singer, assembles his lyrics in large part from snippets of overheard conversations.

* Perhaps in part because of the prominence of the songs “Born Slippy.NUXX” and “Dark Train” in the film Trainspotting, “cinematic” is an adjective frequently used to describe Underworld’s fairly epic form of dance music.

* “Pink Floyd with beats” is a phrase I’ll use to describe them in a pinch.

* Underworld’s music is very, very good as an accompaniment for travel by train or car. I interviewed them once and they told me everyone tells them this. Maybe it’s because of the warmly propulsive beats, maybe it’s because Hyde’s lyrics themselves are often recorded during travel.

* Their music feels blue to me, whatever that means.

* They’re the best live act I’ve ever seen by a comfortable margin.

* “Born Slippy” is that “shouting lager, lager, lager” song.

I got to know Underworld during my first semester of college, thanks to the Trainspotting soundtrack and the “electronica” boomlet. I think they are my first post-adolescent band in that regard. I’ve listened to them more or less constantly since then. Normally this is where the whole “soundtrack of my life” tag would go, and not without good reason, but I think referring to Underworld’s music as “cinematic” gets it all wrong. While it is indeed dramatic, frequently anthemic, it doesn’t help craft your life into a story of some kind, a narrative with beginning, middle, and end, playing out on the screen of your mind–it emphasizes and heightens the emotional content of this moment, whether you’re dancing to it at a concert or listening to it while staring out the window of a train or playing it behind the closed door of your bedroom, with someone or without someone. Underworld is an utterly immediate band.

This two-part mix is pretty simply a collection of many of my favorite songs of theirs, with one or two additions or subtractions for cohesiveness’ sake. If you’d like more, two excellent, wide-ranging collections are already out there: Everything, Everything, a live album from the final tour of the Hyde/Smith/Emerson era, and Underworld 1992-2002, a two-disc greatest-hits-type compilation of all the singles from that decade. I’d also recommend their latest album, Oblivion with Bells–if you liked Animal Collective’s Merriweather Post Pavilion and thought “I want more of this,” that’s a record for you.

I hope you enjoy the mix!

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