At the end of the '90s and into 2000, electronic music was still an underground phenomenon, especially in America.
When I was growing up, I fetishised New York City. It was the land of Lou Reed and the Velvet Underground, it was where Leonard Cohen wrote 'Chelsea Hotel', it was CBGBs and all the punk rock clubs. Artists and musicians lived there, and it was cheap and dangerous.
When I turned to writing fantasy, and writing for young people, it was joyous. It was like discovering an underground lake of ideas that went on forever.
I went underground. So I didn't see [my father] for 11 years. So that was pretty traumatic time for my parents for sure.
Artists have so much more control of their futures - they don't need to rely so much on major labels or big companies to help them. You have artists like Skrillex that can dominate so much that he gets 5 Grammy nominees, and he's clearly an underground artist.
Just the other day in the Underground I enjoyed the pleasure of offering my seat to three ladies.
You either make it illegal, in which case you support a huge underground economy or you tax it within the limits people can afford.
I've been known to write on the Underground in London and on the subway in New York. I have two or three cafes in Paris that I go into. I find a corner with a little shade, and I can work.
I spend so much time in my studio, which can be very dark, so it can begin to feel as if I'm a mole underground.
For the past several years, I have remained what others would consider underground. I did this in order to build a community of people, like-minded in their desire for freedom and the right to pursue their goals and lives without being manipulated and controlled by a media protected military industrial complex with a completely different agenda.
You can sit next to somebody on the underground, and you can look at them quite intensely, but you can never, ever know what they're wearing under their clothes.
We met [with Massimo Pupillo] many years ago in the halcyon days of the underground avant-prog math-rock scene when I was playing in Guapo.
The Earth is our mother just turning around, with her trees in the forest and roots underground. Our father above us whose sigh is the wind, paint us a rainbow without any end.
God is a great underground river that no one can dam up and no one can stop.
Still, language is resilient, and poetry when it is pressured simply goes underground.
How big can you be if just the underground niggas know you? You can't buy your mom a house when you just an underground celebrity.
We have roots that grow towards each other underground. And when all the pretty blossom has fallen from our branches we find that we are one tree and not two.
I'm the diamond in the dirt, that ain't been found. I'm the underground king and I ain't been crowned.
I think what's happenin' is that, with the overflow of music, it's been diluted. There was a time when people would go search out underground records. Now, underground means free, and people don't really care for it. So now artists tend to go more pop and look for the radio.
What a curious picture it is to find man, homo sapiens, of divine origin, we are told, seriously considering going underground to escape the consequences of his own folly. With a little wisdom and foresight, surely it is not yet necessary to forsake life in the fresh air and in the warmth of sunlight. What a paradox if our own cleverness in science should force us to live underground with the moles.