The underground has always been part of the story
The underground electronic music scene has been making me ask a question I didn’t realize I was writing toward: what happens when people start wanting the community as much as they want the show and why?
And I think there is a reason this conversation is happening now.
When I started researching house music for my senior media research project at Virginia State University, I kept finding myself back in Chicago.
House music grew from Black and queer communities in Chicago during the late 1970s and early 1980s, with spaces like the Warehouse giving people somewhere to dance, gather, and build culture on their own terms. The music developed from disco, soul, gospel, and electronic experimentation, carrying the influence of the communities creating it.
The backlash against disco in the late 1970s also became part of that history. Disco Demolition Night in Chicago in 1979 is remembered as a major symbol of the backlash surrounding a genre deeply connected to Black, Latino, and queer audiences. House emerged shortly afterward and found new life in the underground.
My research originally focused on what happened when a culture rooted in marginalized communities became a global commercial industry. The further I got into it, the more interested I became in what happens after the music becomes accessible to everyone.
People still have to find somewhere to belong.
Electronic music got bigger. The room still matters.
Electronic music is now a multibillion-dollar global industry. The 2026 IMS Business Report valued the industry at $15.1 billion for 2025, covering everything from recorded music and streaming to festivals, clubs, technology, sponsorships, and merchandise.
There is nothing inherently wrong with electronic music getting bigger. But the bigger the industry becomes, the easier it is to forget what originally made these scenes worth showing up for.
I’ve started noticing artists and events pushing back toward smaller, stranger, more personal experiences.
Of The Trees’ Park Service series is one example. In Washington, D.C., the project transformed his tour into a space built around nature, exploration, and dancing before the show even began. With Nature Walks and meetups happening during the day leading up to the Moonglade Park takeover of BERTHA in DC’s warehouse district.
Mersiv recently took that idea in a different direction with a free pop-up at Moodswing in Denver, bringing together Mersiv, VEIL, and Smoakland for a night outside the traditional ticketed concert model.
The details are different, but the instinct feels familiar.
Make the room matter again.
Big Dub Festival understands the assignment
I saw that most clearly at Big Dub in Pennsylvania.
Big Dub doesn’t need to become the biggest bass festival in the country to matter. Its culture is built into the experience itself. Theme camps, workshops, activities, art, swimming, drum circles, meditation, and community participation are part of what people return for year after year. The festival describes its theme camps as an interactive core of the event, with attendees creating and maintaining communal spaces themselves.
That says a lot about what people are actually looking for.
You can remember a massive production for the lasers, but you remember a community because you were part of it.
Richmond, Virginia is giving me a lot to talk about
I’m based in Virginia, and I’ve spent the past year paying close attention to what is happening across the Mid-Atlantic electronic music scene, particularly in Virginia and the surrounding markets.
For anyone outside the region, RVA means Richmond, Virginia. It is one of the places that has made me increasingly interested in what happens when a city’s electronic music culture develops without waiting for national attention.
Richmond has collectives, independent promoters, DJs, visual artists, underground events, and people willing to take creative risks with the spaces available to them. Platforms like Turnstyle, RVA Mag, and ChannelRVA are documenting Richmond’s underground electronic community, while newer spaces such as Pandora Cafe are intentionally (and quite literally) creating room for local DJs and producers.
And the interesting part is that Richmond is only one piece of the Mid-Atlantic.
There is a lot happening across Virginia, Maryland, Washington, D.C., Pennsylvania, Delaware, New Jersey, and beyond that deserves to be looked at as its own story rather than a footnote to larger electronic music markets.
The artists are paying attention, too
I saw another version of this with Tape B and Levity’s Summer Program tour.
The 2026 co-headlining tour brought the two artists through 12 North American cities, including Richmond, Virginia, alongside markets like Kansas City, Cincinnati, Huntsville, Charlotte, and others that do not always get treated as automatic stops on major electronic tours.
When they came through Richmond, they also made an effort to hear from the local community and adjust parts of the venue experience around what attendees were asking for.
That stuck with me.
There is something happening when artists start treating the audience as participants in the experience instead of simply ticket holders.
And maybe that is why smaller rooms, local scenes, free events, community spaces, and independent promoters keep popping back up alongside an industry that keeps getting bigger.
So, where does that leave us?
I think the underground is worth watching because it tells us where electronic music is going before the rest of the industry catches up.
The Mid-Atlantic has plenty of stories like that.
I want to find them.
Welcome to Ground Level.
This is where I’ll be looking at the people building electronic music culture from the ground up across the Mid-Atlantic, from Virginia to the cities and communities beyond it. The artists you haven’t heard about yet. The promoters taking chances. The collectives creating their own spaces. The venues worth knowing. And the communities making all of it possible.
Let’s see who’s next.
