Underworld
Born Slippy .NUXX

Karl Hyde and Rick Smith represent a fundamental partnership of minds for electronic music. Fully embracing the period of rave parties in England, they revolutionized the club culture showing (among many things) in their approach to predominantly techno music a considerable rock band demeanor. It's not appropriate to speak of techno with well-defined edges; in fact, the blend of their compositions and performances reveal several cards of the future (and quite imminent) trip-hop and drum and and bass, evolving into a distinctive and reference style.

Their world is composed of lengthy sonic climbs that render reality rarefied, amidst innumerable minutes of ever-evolving patterns between stacks of layers filtering senses through the listening of a decidedly hallucinogenic music. Their structures range from the slow and imperceptible progression of sounds typical of a techno that seems to never start, to the complete relaxation of chillout compositions. Their rhythms are as ethereal as they are robotic, displaying incredible research in the mutability of a single song and melodies that never get lost, underpinning the music of this indelible duo. The songs of the Underworld erect skyscrapers in a suburban procession of sounds, they are extremely atmospheric, so multifaceted and kaleidoscopic as to offer an obligatory mental trance.

Even listening to Born Slippy .NUXX it's impossible not to feel transported elsewhere. It is an anthem, a watershed for a musical genre that remained "in the underworld" until then. Do not confuse it with the previous single Born Slippy, Born Slippy .NUXX (the addition of the suffix was due to a computer error, and thus the title was decided), it’s a single that saw the light the same year when the Underworld released their fourth effort (1996), an LP that is a worthy continuation of their masterpiece from two years prior.

But while the LP evolves their sound into a more ambient vein with iridescences of soft drum and bass and IDM nuances, the single stands in a decidedly different manner from this progressive trend. A track born as a joke, it proposes a cathartic and liberating music in its nostalgic advance. Dominating and becoming distinctive in the main version of the song is a voice that seems to travel according to the stream of consciousness of an alienated mind, halfway between singing and speaking, between accusation and solace, almost devoid of any expressiveness. With various remixes depending on the country of publication, the work is structured by offering in many variations the main version of the single, fatefully enshrined in the soundtrack of the depiction of a youth empty and lacking in stimulus as was the film Trainspotting (1996). In this way, it became a song that many do not know they know.

This work propelled techno and once and for all the Underworld into the charts. I find in all this a fault: having stepped on and condemned to oblivion that fantastic album that was Second Toughest in the Infant. Probably the most famous techno song of the '90s, in all its merits I believe it does not properly represent the style of the duo, remaining something exemplary in its less musical importance.

Drive boy, dog boy, dirty, numb angel boy
In the doorway boy, she was a lipstick boy
She was a beautiful boy and tears boy
And all in your inner space boy
You had chemicals boy, I've grown so close to you
Boy and you just groan boy
She said, "Come over, come over", she smiled at you boy.