Sounds Of the Underground (SOTU) 2024: A Chat from the Underground - Interview with Frank Vis and Zeynep Sarıkartal

“Yeh, it started with a friend of mine I was studying with at the time. We saw this festival, ZXZW, a festival in Tilburg later called Incubate, it was a very nice set-up. They invited different alternative music scenes to play at the festival. We thought, yeah , it’s a pity that it’s not in Amsterdam. That’s how we came up with the idea. It took a couple of years to organise it. Unfortunately, my friend didn’t manage to finish studying, and so he couldn’t organise it with me. So I grouped some other friends. I asked for help from the Hallo Gallo crew. Johan Keuth, who was a part of it, also designed the first SOTU poster,” says Frank Vis, one of the initiators of SOTU. 

Johann Kauth’s artwork, alongside the other posters made for the festival, can be found on sotufestival.com, also home to SOTU’s extensive and thoroughly documented archive. The archive not only includes the past acts and posters of who had played throughout the years, but also visual experimentations, mixes, and Comix Underground News’ contribution in 2014-2015 of a comic documentation of the festival. Zeynep Sarıkartal, who performed at SOTU this year, also commented on SOTU’s organisers’ commitment to archiving everything. She says it’s probably one of Europe’s best online archives of underground music events. Parallel to SOTU there is also Radio Patapoe, with Hans and his live transmissions of the festival’s happenings on the website bah.amsterdam, (also thoroughly archived). 

“It was also this idea of, ‘let’s group up together, programmers, organisers, form a team and set up the festival,’” comments Frank. Perhaps a simple sentiment, but with a city like Amsterdam, continuously changing and growing with different subcultures and scenes, it seems almost impossible to achieve now. Though many different initiatives are giving space to certain music niches, without much overlap, these spaces become transitory and disjointed. 

The roots of SOTU run deep though, deeper than genre niches. Deep through Europe, connecting artists, and pulling people back into Amsterdam. These profound connections are nurtured via a cast of programmers. This year, Frank mainly programmed it along with Linda (Parasnol), Shoco Mune, Bomi (sitbq), Jaco, and Teun. Applications to play are quite open but fill up fast -as it is mostly run through Google sheets  and email threads. Also, many friends from the past years still come back and play. 

Friends such as Zeynep Sarıkartal, also known as ZS ZS. Ankara-born, Vienna resident, she has been playing at SOTU since 2018. “There is this sound system crew in Vienna that also made a party/event series called Panzerschokolade. They had organised some shows, where Frank and the other friends from Berlin came out to play, such as DEL_F64.0. In 2018, I ended up connecting with Frank, Zara and Lena ( DEL_F64.0), and we toured around Europe all together with a friend from the Panzerschokolade crew, and SOTU was the last stop.” And magically continent is connected, through friends of friends of bookers, of programmers, of drummers, of instrument makers, of poets, of others. This is the strength of the underground scene in its current state. Its stability and test of time can be attributed to its long-lasting connections, beyond an instagram follow. Perhaps younger generations of organisers and programmers can learn from them by understanding the benefit of growing a community outside of the online sphere, while still  maintaining an online archive. This way there is still a manner in which new people can engage with organising, though in a more consistent way. 

“There was this large network of people, back in the day, that stretched from the North of France to Praxis records in Berlin and other parallel networks through Eastern Europe, Turkey, some parts of the Middle East and South-Eastern Asia. This year at SOTU, there were also some artists from the French scene that Bomi brought out, such as I M M. These communities are/were connected with squat houses. For example in Berlin, not only are they connected with later squatted houses, but also with bunkers left over from the 2nd World War. These bunkers went from war bunkers to prisons for the Rote Armee to becoming home to the underground rave scene, in the 80s and 90s, later gaining the title of ‘cultural spaces’. By being a cultural space, these kinds of places made it to the mid-2000s, escaping from gentrification. But, just as we got to your generation, the state of gentrification has gotten so bad, even the places that have a cultural status, are being repressed by evasive politics. Especially during the pandemic, these spaces were closing one by one. Just in Berlin, maybe a dozen of them closed.” Zeynep comments and adds... “On the other hand, you have cultural politics, and culture tourism, again in Berlin, with Techno, which is shown as an underground thing, though is actually very much in the mainstream, that is being pushed by the minister of cultural activities. Due to this, there is a separation between the actual underground and the one ministries are funding. This separation is created consciously to keep older generations from passing on knowledge. Naturally, the new generation has a harder time knowing about the actual underground scene that came before them. Inversely, the older generations stopped showing up to the newer initiatives, and turning their noses up to newer events.” 

This trend in disconnection is seen in Amsterdam just as in Berlin, where you see fewer and fewer free music events, and more events being held in club spaces with a certain barrier of entry. This is why SOTU’s persistence is important as a leg of the larger underground scene. 
These sparse cultural spaces are victims of external pressure from policymakers, as Zeynep says above, but also victims of an increase in self-policing. “It seems like people are embracing this government control a bit more. To not be too wild,” comments Frank on the fact that these spaces are losing their edge. 

I think SOTU is a beautiful part of the music ecosystem, and I hope to see more people my age gather together in a similar manner, rather than programming separate niche events. Maybe this could be a way to save the free spaces, and make sure they don’t get lost to oblivion. A personal fear of mine is the idea that free music culture is dwindling. Not only from the increased pressure the government puts on culture spaces, as Zeynep says above, but also a lack of knowledge from the new coming programmers on the scene. The disconnect between the older and younger generations needs to be mended in order to clear up certain assumptions about space, and how to ‘police’ it. Another aspect of this generational gap is the ever-expanding cultural gap between those who found the physical underground in the city, and those who found underground communities online. Though gaps lead to the dissonance of people, genre, and sound, that in turn yields the most exciting happenings once it all comes back together. 

*Thank you Frank for the nice SOTU stories, and Zeynep for the great critical conversation about the current state of the underground scene.