reviving the underground

it was a sunny warm april afternoon. a friend of mine and i were running through a subway underpass in frankfurt hoping to catch our train. somewhat out of breath furkan brought up an idea mid run. “imagine playing a dj set right here” he said. i instantly said “yeah why not”. and without us knowing, this was the start of underground sessions.

furkan had been djing for about half a year and was a bit obsessed with it. he had made the joke of saying “imagine playing a dj set here” a hundred times whenever we saw a nice location or view. usually we just laughed it off and said “yeah imagine that” without meaning it. this was the first time it landed differently. the reasons why only became clear to me later.

both furkan and i were a bit fed up with what going out had become. we wanted to try something different. i will get back to that later.

furkan had just broken up with his ex and i had recently quit my old job, so the two of us had some time for new things at our hands. i had also been missing videography and this genuinely seemed like something we could make happen easily. some days after we walked through the underpass i mentioned it again and furkan said he would be down to do it.

i knew it probably wouldnt happen if i didnt make it happen, so i put a date in our calendars and furkan agreed. i deliberately set it two weeks into the future so it was far enough away for furkan to say yes, but now we also had a deadline. thats how it slowly became something more concrete.

we wanted to create something we would actually feel comfortable being at ourselves: open, informal and without an image to uphold. subway stations felt like the natural answer. we liked the idea of reclaiming them from being pure transit space, dead space you hurry through, especially in winter when the city has almost no free indoor places to gather.

furkan had never played in front of a crowd and was eager to change that. i hadnt had a real video project in almost a year and was looking for a reason to get my camera back out. the fact that it would be mostly vertical video for social media was interesting to me specifically because i had never worked that way before. on top of that i had recently started getting into music myself, learning to dj and building a small op1-style mini synth.

we were both curious to start a project that interacts more with the people and with the city around us.

preparations

in the beginning i started turning the concept into plans and furkan built on them. we began with the technical but necessary part of creating a brand identity. after making a logo, we started organizing the first event.

a week before the first session furkan and i met up and filmed a short teaser for it.

i edited it and we planned to upload it to instagram but we actually never did. i am not exactly sure why, but i assume we were scared. we werent sure if this was really going to be a thing, and we also had things to do other than posting to 0 subscribers. we showed the teaser to a number of friends, inviting them to join us for a little dance at the first event.

creating this teaser alone was really interesting to me as this was the first time creating vertical video and i got to admit i started liking the format. i feel like story telling in vertical is somehow a lot different to horizontal. when editing vertical i feel the pressure of the audiences attention being even more precious while also feeling like i can have multiple story lines at once due to the added vertical space. i really enjoyed the process.

another necessary technicality we had to get out of the way was choosing a trainstop for the event. we landed on dornbusch for a number of reasons.

1. first of all there is a nice underground passage with comparably good sound
2. this passage creates a natural dancefloor
3. which is not next to any train tracks for safety reasons.
4. we are not annoying a lot of people as the station is located outside of the city center so that there is not a lot of traffic and the underpass is far enough from residential homes that nobody would be losing sleep over us at midnight.

these were in general our 4 criteria for choosing stations for underground session events, also dornbusch had been the exact station where we had the idea to start underground sessions so it just fit.

a few days before the event furkan read a bit up on performing in the subway stations (as according to law they are private property of our local public transport company rmv). we were unsure about what rules exactly applied and if this could be counted as being ‘street musicians’ in which case we would have needed a permit.

we werent sure what rules applied, so we decided we would leave immediately and without argument if anyone objected. as this was going to be in the middle of the night outside the city center, we assumed we wouldnt annoy anyone.

the first session

on the evening of thursday the 15th of may 2025 our first event began. furkan and i met up at 6pm and tested all the equipment. mixxx, the free open source dj software we used, had issues with some of the windows audio interfaces and did not want to work. we fixed that and some other issues we hadnt thought of, and without us really noticing it was 10pm already. by the time the event was over it was friday the 16th.

the first session was intended as a minimal test run (what tech people would call an mvp), but even with that in mind the equipment we got was almost comical. furkan borrowed an over 20-year-old dj-controller (vci-100) from somewhere, we used his flatmates old kitchen bluetooth speaker (hk go play), and i added a video light and some waterbottle crates for a table.

before starting we quickly got a döner to eat, after which we went to the location and set everything up. it took us a bit longer than expected, but we were ready to start only an hour later than we had planned. during setup our friend etienne arrived and helped us. the three of us had grown into somewhat of a trio that summer and he was there to support us 🫶. etienne was actually the only person who showed up from the ~20 friends we had invited.

a lot of things failed. after twenty minutes of the set etienne accidentally tripped over the audio cable and the set stopped for a minute. the three of us simply laughed it off, having a good time. i first felt really uncomfortable playing music this loud in a public space, but after some minutes i got used to it. it was a thursday around midnight and our speaker was small, so the station was quiet outside our tunnel. almost at the very end a guy stopped to have a dance. his name was max and he was the only stranger who stopped that night. we had really hoped someone would, but hadnt actually expected it. seeing the first stranger dance at one of our events was something special to us.

once furkan had finished his dj-set and the music stopped playing we were euphoric. this felt like the start of something very cool. nevertheless it was late, so we quickly threw all our things into our backpacks and brought them to my flat, which was right around the corner from the station. after talking it all through we went home around 2am. we still had to get up early on friday morning.

the following day etienne asked furkan and me if he could join underground as a third member and the both of us agreed as the three of us were a really close group of friends anyway.

the first session was a great learning experience. for example since then we always taped cables so it was impossible to trip over them. also now we had some footage to start putting on all kinds of social media channels. i was a bit busy in those days so i simply rendered out the whole sequence of the set and did some dirty phone capcut edits for instagram. the idea was to feed the algorithm and to better put out bad content than none at all.

besides that i started experimenting around with some visualizer concepts but never had the time to truly implement them well into our concept.

session two

after the first session we knew session two was inevitable. we wanted to improve in every regard and create something fun. to get there we first needed to pick a new subway station. this time it should be more central in the city for more people to pass us and hopefully participate in the event.

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we met two weeks after the first session to scout train stations, but that day we didnt find anything reasonable. after that we somehow didnt talk about underground for quite a while as we were all busy. i had started writing my thesis, etienne was preparing his poster for a conference and furkan was preparing for the semesters exam period.

some months later, in mid august, i brought it up again and this time it stuck. we started to actually plan session two seriously. we went scouting and this time i decided our next station to be dom/römer. i really liked it as we had a small hallway right next to the main walking way which meant that we would not be in the way of anyone wanting to use the subway. it was not next to train tracks, it had a really nice look with the completely white tiles all around and it was right in the city center with only shops and bars around (no actual residents who we would keep from sleeping). in all honesty the area is one of the most touristic areas of frankfurt but we were fine with that.

this time we did a more proper job and publicly announced the event on instagram. furkan rented a proper speaker this time (a soundbooks 4) and a power station. also by some magic he was able to borrow an all-in-one dj-controller (pioneer dj opus quad) from someone he knew and we were set. while the first event was just to prove that we could do it at all, this time we set our goal to actually entertain a crowd, however small it may be.

sadly etienne couldnt join this time as he was in philadelphia to present his workshop-paper at the collas conference so this time it was just the two of us (and a lot of friends).

furkan brought the speaker and dj-controller (the friend he borrowed it from helped with the transportation) and i brought a whole bunch of camera equipment. we were ready to start.

this event was also the first time we used an ironing board as a table for the dj controller which has now become a staple at our events.

for session two about 15 friends showed up, and strangers stopped by several times to dance for a while.

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this time i focused more on taking images (whereas at the first session i tried to film the entire thing). i had started to enjoy the blurred image aesthetic many action/community photographers had established on social media so i tried to replicate that style and it was a lot of fun. i did also film a bit but sadly never had the time to properly edit the footage.

we had some really funny interactions with some of the strangers. this time i really started feeling that underground could become something larger than just the three of us and that underground as a project had the power to connect the people of our city.

we still hadnt learned to start setting up early enough, so once more we began a bit late and after 30mins of furkan playing his set he noticed, that he was not recording it so we restarted all recordings 😅. as a result the event took a bit longer than expected (to the enjoyment of our crowd). we had planned to be done at 11:30pm but with everything that happened we wouldve finished around 12:30am. at 12:15am the police arrived to tell us to stop as someone (who we later found out to have been the bar owner at a neighbouring bar who was afraid that someone would call the police on him for the music so he called the police on us 🫠) came to tell us to stop.

they were really nice but explained to us that after midnight we did not have the right to be loud and as there was complaint by someone they had to stop us. we asked if we could play the last 15minutes as the set would be done anyway by then but they told us no.

while it was sad we stayed calm and played it nice, the police officers were obviously just doing their job and one of them even told us that if he wouldnt be at work right now he would have loved to join and dance. again all of this were signs to us that we were doing something right.

funnily enough, months later, once we got some traction on instagram, someone who said she was one of the police officers messaged us and apologized for stopping session two.

once the event was done we took some finishing photos, packed our things, cleaned up the space (like cleaning up all the beer bottles) and went home. after the event we sat down at furkans place and recapped the event a bit. i finally got home at 2am riding my bike through the rain with all my equipment in a stuffed ikea bag.

in the following days and weeks i edited some photos and did some very very minimal video stuff (mostly sending color graded clips to furkan so he could at least post anything) as the work for my master thesis got a bit involved at this point and i (surprisingly) set my priorities correct at that point.

after the last event we were feeling the momentum behind underground. session three was clearly going to happen; the only question was when. with etienne back from his trip we were ready to get going once more and once larger.

the underground philosophy

we didnt start underground with some big philosophy behind it. but some moments made us understand what we liked about it: max stopping for a dance at the first session, strangers wandering in at session two, a police officer saying he wouldve joined if he wasnt working, and later the rmv security guards apologizing for having to stop us. then there was etienne helping a woman collect bottles for her church, exchanging landline numbers with her and eventually getting all three of us invited there. these are the moments we remember most.

most of our crowd does look like us, mostly students in their twenties. thats completely fine. everyone can still join, and we especially enjoyed it whenever someone we had not expected wandered in and stayed.

the three of us were a bit upset with modern clubbing culture. clubs could feel like stages for self-presentation instead of places to enjoy music with friends or strangers. paying for expensive drinks after first having to get past a bouncer who might not even let you in made the whole thing feel like a product. we wanted a place where we would feel comfortable ourselves, and where everyone is welcome as long as they respect the people around them.

choosing subway stations was no coincidence. they feel like public space, even though legally rmv controls them and can ask us to leave. usually they are just places you hurry through. we liked using them as a place where people stayed for a while instead.

of course all of this ends once someone does not respect their peers, picks fights, disrespects or invades someones rights in any other form.

session three

everything started with scouting a new station. we met 3 weeks in a row (for 2-3h each) to ride the subway lines up and down and check stations along the way for something that fit our criteria. with our now grown confidence, we were in the mood for more random bystanders and ready to take that chance. we landed on merianplatz. etienne was not deeply involved at this stage, and furkan told me that i ‘have an eye for aesthetics’ and trusted my judgement. by this point the way we worked together was increasingly based on that kind of trust.

interestingly enough i found out that merianplatz had been designed by the same architects as dom/römer while doing the research for this article. maybe by accident designed in a way that is best for our events, who knows.

one evening after my brain was cooked from working on my thesis furkan and i met at 10pm at the station for a tiny photoshoot for our announcement post on instagram and the deal was booked (so to say).

on the 18th of october we showed up at the subway station. furkan brought some of his roommates, ironing board, dj-controller and laptop in hand. i once again had a whole bunch of photo and video equipment.

this time furkan had downgraded back to the laptop setup as the guy who had lent the all-in-one dj-controller last time had since sold it, but that also meant that furkan had actually bought himself his own dj-controller.

honestly, isnt it crazy that he played two events without even owning a dj controller? i find that to be quite inspirational in terms of not having the means but still trying. of course this was only possible thanks to a great network of supportive friends but all of that does not come from nowhere.

this time we had a small crowd already while setting up all the equipment. it took us a bit longer as furkan wasnt able to start the recording with his new unfamiliar controller and in the end we decided to simply go without it and not record the audio this time as we already had a crowd and felt like we had to start so we would not lose the people.

the station started filling up with people and we noticed that the particular station was a really good choice as we were standing right next to the flow of passengers meaning that we were easy to find but no one was stopped by us from getting to their train.

right at the beginning i filmed a story going down the escalator with a ragebaity caption and tagged all local frankfurt instagram accounts in the hope of some of them reposting the event so we could gain some organic reach. this was a tactic we already planned to do at session two but in the chaos of things didnt get to. we also told our friends to tag the local accounts they knew in their stories and it actually happened, we got reposted by a local memepage called ffm.meme, at that time they had around 160k subscribers of which most were frankfurt residents (exactly our target audience).

i was doing my part, capturing images and filming clips of the event. this time even some friends of mine showed up and i was balancing that with connecting with them, as the vibe was really enjoyable.

etienne has never been a person to dance at events such as these but he was standing in the corner, overlooking the crowd and enjoying himself. he talked with lots of people, helped me keep the canon g7x recording (as it has a 4gb record limit which meant that someone had to restart the recording every 15ish minutes) and helped wherever he could.

he helped an old woman collect the glass bottles (as in germany there is a refund when you return the empty bottles to a store) and they connected really well and exchanged phone numbers (he actually got the older womans land line number 😅). later it turned out that she collected the bottles to donate the proceeds to the local church which was helping people in need. she herself worked there and later invited the three of us to come stop by at the church and we had a really nice talk. she invited us to maybe join her one day to visit iran (where she was from) and do a music session there. i am telling this story as just one example of how different all the connections we made through underground sessions were and how it truly connected all kinds of people.

the event went on and on, and our crowd kept growing with every train that stopped. at times we were up to 80 people, etienne later told us, as he had counted heads from time to time.

the police was patrolling the street above as the station we chose this time was located on one of frankfurts most popular going out streets (berger straße) but they only slowly drove by (the one time i saw them they even smiled hearing the music from below) as the situation was obviously peaceful and it was not too late yet (we learned from session two in that regard 😉).

the clips we had shared from the first session&2 had attracted a mix of dj and hiphop dancing subcultures as well as some streetworkers and just some cool people who were into underground events and culture. it was really pleasant.

naturally at some point (after about 2h) we stopped as furkan was done with his set and we wanted to stay inside the limits of the law in terms of allowed hours to play loud music.

furkan played one last song and everyone danced together, this had almost family vibes.

this time we had prepared a donation box and people actually supported us which made session three the first underground event in which we did not lose money (well depends on how you define it). we made 75€ that evening which just covered what we had paid for the speaker (60€) and some miscellaneous stuff (donation box, gaffa tape, etc). on the first session we didnt really spend money and only used what we already had but with session two there was a significant loss in our books. we just did it for the fun of it but it was nice to see that it got semi sustainable at this point.

we thought of starting talks with the city to get some sort of cultural funding but we never got to it. some local politicians started following us after session three, so this is something we might investigate in the future.

after the event we quickly packed our things and cleaned the space up as good as we could. jumped in an uber, drove all the equipment home and went out all together that night.

the next morning i drove over to furkans to get all my equipment back and did the first curation of images for the instagram post about last nights event. we uploaded the first post directly there.

in the meantime we were gaining a lot of followers as we were still in the instagram stories of numerous people (ffm.meme among others). we really felt our instagram account picking up momentum that sunday morning as we were sitting on the sofa together and telling each other every 20 minutes that we got “300 subscribers!” then “can you imagine, 350 subscriber!” and lastly ending the day with a message from furkan in our group chat at 11pm “400 subscribers!”. these numbers felt crazy and gaining 150 subscribers in a single day was unimaginable even a few days ago.

i got a bit sick the following week (i think i was a bit overworked with my thesis, underground on the weekends and doing projects of my own on the side such as my homelab and others) and stayed home a few days. on the last day of my being sick i didnt want to be at home anymore. i was yearning for some fresh air and a way to live out my creative spirit. i packed my camera after lunch, rode the subway to the merianplatz subway station and recorded some clips for the fun of it. i was truly in flow state and i was looking for aesthetics for the first time in a while again.

back home i edited some things together, i had an artistic approach to it focusing on the vibe and being true, not overly hypey or anything but just being honest and showing what we were up to. i had the edit done in a few hours and sent it to the others for their opinions. i was really happy to have done a proper edit again instead of only doing the bare minimum for our social media presence. this made me believe in underground as a creative outlet more again.

the others told me they really liked it, i further adapted the colors a tiny bit and we posted it the next day.

the people following us really enjoyed it as well and the instagram algorithm even started suggesting it to more people. again we felt an uptick in the ‘motion’ the project was accumulating. the subscriber number kept growing. over the following weeks politicians followed the page and between 5 and 10 news outlets reached out to us. we were in talks with the hessenschau (the state news channel), but these ultimately failed because they didnt want to report to a larger audience about something whose legality was still unclear (totally understandable of course).

people actually also started recognizing us as the video i had created now was being pushed by the instagram algorithm really intensely to people who had otherwise never heard of us. at that time the video had around 30 thousand views, we were making 100 new subscribers a day and naturally we wanted to do a next event.

session four

we knew that we definitely could not do session four in a station the same size as session three. at this point we had almost tripled our followers closing in on a thousand. we were looking into larger stations, candidates we considered were messe, zoo and bockenheimer warte.

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again we did our usual station spotting and finally decided on bockenheimer warte for a number of reasons. we knew with the growth we were experiencing that we needed a larger venue, too many people in a small station and things could derail. on the other hand a location that was too large would also be not optimal as the energy of the event needs to be somewhat condensed to really feel like an intense experience. we wanted it to be a central location again so that people could easily reach it, it should be aesthetic so that images and videos would be pretty and lastly we needed a sort of escape plan in the case that we were too many people or anyone from the public transport company told us we had to leave we needed a place to go to. luckily Bockenheimer Warte and its 2001 Extension satisfied all of our requirements.

once we had decided that, we met up one day after uni at the station and filmed a few clips. in one of the clips etienne and furkan play a situation where etienne tells furkan about this new event what would play out in the underground station on the weekend. other than that it was just a bunch of clips of us fooling around. i captured all of that and a few days later when i was in need of something to procrastinate on my thesis i edited the clip in the library.

it took me a little less than 4h. i simply edited a small compilation of the funniest moments from that station scouting trip. i just wanted to transport the vibe of this just being an event to have fun at (in german we say ‘atzig’). even leaving the scene where we explain the event out, just have it be completely be a vibes based video. the event information was only in the video description.

i uploaded the video and the instagram algorithm for some magical reason really loved it. the video was being shown to all kinds of people from frankfurt and we were getting even more followers. it just kept growing, after a week 50 thousand people had seen it and our subscribers had multiplied again. at this point almost everyone we were talking to in the city at our age had seen or heard about underground. even at the time of writing i regularly encounter people who have seen the clips i edited but never made the connection that i am a part of underground. i really like this fact as it means to me that the idea of underground is standing on its own.

this time furkan had rented all the equipment online but two days before the event the equipment got cancelled on us (by the rental website), so in a last effort to somehow make it happen i went to a local bikerave and asked around to find out if someone owned a speaker that we could rent for our event. funnily enough i actually found till, who had seen us on instagram already and told me he could give us two of the exact speakers we had been looking for.

in the days leading up to the event we did a lot of planning of what to do in all kinds of situations. we had put tape on the floor to signal to the crowd where to stand and where to leave room for people to pass us. we planned our next steps for all situations especially as we had no idea at all how many people would show up, it could realistically have been anywhere between 50 (like the event before) and 500 people or any number in between and for all of those options we had to be prepared. after a good amount of planning we felt ready for the event.

the 8th of november rolled around and we were ready (well, we had to be). i felt sick and was tired from working on my thesis, but furkan had spent the last week preparing his set so there was nothing to come between him and performing that evening. i just somehow got myself to the event (getting lost once on the way to the station), and as i arrived the others were already setting up the speakers etc.

etienne and i put the tape on the floor and while we were starting to put everything in place, hanging cameras and lights some friends slowly started to arrive and even people we didnt yet know started showing up. there was a romanian homeless couple who had put their mattress on the floor in the large room where we were planning to have people dance to loud music. communicating was difficult as they didnt speak german or english, but before the event started we told them what we were planning and that the station was large enough for them to find another spot. they decided to stay. when rmv security stopped us about 30 minutes later they also told the couple to leave, as sleeping in the station was not allowed either. by then our event had started and we didnt get to talk to them again.

with every train stopping at the station our crowd grew, the music was echoing of the walls and people were dancing

after half an hour a few men working for the rmv security showed up and asked us if we had a permit. we told them earnestly that we did not and they asked us to turn the music down as it was hard to hear the announcements on the platform. the men were really nice and we saw that they were obviously just doing their job, we turned down the music and after a minute of the three of us agreeing on the next step i told the crowd that we would be forced to stop in the station but the plan was to move up to the university campus and continue the rave there.

etienne talked with the security men some more and later told us that they apologized a lot to him as they themselves felt bad for stopping the event as they saw that it was obviously harming no one and everything was very wholesome. they even gave etienne their phone numbers just in case.

but back to the event, while moving was not optimal it was a lot better than stopping and our crowd was very much up for the adventure. we moved outside where it was misty and slightly raining with temperatures around 10C. we had more people asking us if they could help than we were able to reasonable provide tasks for and after a few minutes and a flight of stairs later we had setup everything upstairs.

the time without music was quite stressful as we were afraid that people would leave if we didnt start quickly, this meant that we even sang happy birthday with a crowd of 300 people for a stranger from said crowd (who most likely did not have their birthday that day) to keep the crowd entertained.

once the music started playing everything went back to normal and our crowd even started growing. the new location was directly on the bockenheim campus which meant that there were no residential buildings around but also a large number of people joined us just walking by.

as we were not in a tunnel anymore and our speakers were standing on the floor our setup sadly was not able to entertain the entire crowd anymore, after the first 8 rows of people almost all highs were muffled down by the peoples winter clothing and only the rhythmic bass was keeping people grooving along while talking to their friends further back.

furkans set was the best he had played so far (if i may say so), at least the people in the front rows told us afterwards that this had been one of the best dj sets they ever attended. furkan was really happy with that feedback. it was getting colder and colder and slowly our crowd shrunk. around midnight furkan finished the set and the remaining 150 people applauded his performance.

i had been filming almost without breaks only sometimes stopping to talk with friends and strangers. at some point the hessischer rundfunk journalist who had messaged us approached me and once we noticed that we already had been texting each other she asked some questions about the project with me being more than happy to answer, it was a really fun conversation.

after the set was done we packed our stuff, called an uber and went to furkans place where we talked some more about life and how things were progressing, opened up the donation box to find that people gave us 57€ this time which made the event roughly net 0 thanks to till supplying us the speakers free of charge. being really tired i took a rental bike home with all my equipment again in an ikea bag.

after session four

after the event we had a lot of things to work through. first of all i edited a event summary video and we uploaded it. again it was received very well. with that done we reflected on the event and how to improve in the future. we thought about changing the speaker system in the future with the crowd growing but the obvious thing to talk about was clearly our choice of location and our relation to the local public transportation company rmv.

with our new found knowledge we knew bockenheimer warte to be clearly flawed for two reasons. on the one hand the area where we played music was not on the same level as the train platform but the staircase between the two sections is more like a very big hallway which made the music very directly audible on the train platform. on the other hand bockenheimer warte is a terminal station which made it so that there is a lot more rmv security worker traffic there. it is a very common station for them to transfer trains. their usual job is just to check train passengers for valid tickets but obviously when they see us they are forced to ask us for a permit etc.

this meant that the likelihood of getting ’thrown out’ so to say was a lot higher there than in most other train stations in frankfurt. on the other hand, we had not officially registered our event with rmv who owns the stations (has ‘hausrecht’). so we decided to try to get in contact with rmv and make the next event official.

we asked in our instagram story if someone knew someone in a decision-making position at rmv and got a number of helpful answers. one guy who worked there even asked about it in their weekly meeting at work (thats kind of cool, ngl). in the end we got an email address to write to.

although this process had started very promising it came the way we had initially expected it to go. we wrote a really nice email describing what we do and added our instagram for reference. we then got told by the rmv manager that they had been thinking about similar things in the past but never realized them. we got told that there are some stations that had been checked by an appraiser and found to be viable for such events. he told us that it would be possible to rent the space for events.

we were slightly surprised that we would need to pay a fee as usually street musicians are not paying rent for the spaces they play in but we were curious and asked for a quote. we thought that if there was enough interest we might be able to crowdfund the money or find some other way to make it possible. but sadly the answer to that was that he just found out that using ‘speaker or light systems in underground facilities’ is against their fire safety regulations. this meant no permit for us.

doing events without a permit from rmv is not an option for us as we are doing this publicly and the fine can be up to 20.000€ (which we dont intend to and couldnt even theoretically pay as the three of us are all still students).

what the future holds

since rmv did not want us in their stations, we had to rethink what underground could be.

we started looking for legal options that kept the connection to trains. one of them became an event in a tram with ‘die partei’, registered as a political protest and therefore legal. it was wild and the first time we had made an event in a moving train. the acoustics were awful and it also ended really early. we had our fun, but it was quite stressful. i had problems filming in the tight space, while furkan couldnt properly hear the music he was playing and therefore couldnt make clean transitions.

we also wanted to find out which underpasses close to stations belonged to rmv and which belonged to the city, as different rules apply. another option was to interpret ‘underground’ less literally: not only underground stations, but events for subculture and less known artists, which was always part of the idea anyway.

right now underground is standing still and we still havent figured out how to continue. if there was an easy way to return to the subway stations i think we would love to do that, but as things are now we are still looking for a new concept. it needs to be precise enough to feel like underground while leaving us enough room to experiment and have fun. we may have lost a bit of our dna along the way, but we are not done trying things. we are quite sure it will be a lot of fun!