Revisit the Art of Underworld's 'Dubnobasswithmyheadman'

All images courtesy of Tomato Twenty years on, Underworld's Dubnobasswithmyheadman still feels creatively vital. As a visual and sonic document of London's early 90s rave culture and artistic ferment, it's matchless—though the musical efforts found in Leftfield's genre-breaking Leftism, Orbital's first three records, and Aphex Twin's early recordings should not be diminished.

So when Underworld's Karl Hyde and Rick Smith reissued the album, it didn't come as too much of a surprise. The duo, ever ambitious, packed a treasure trove of demos and unreleased tracks across multiple formats and editions. Among this aural cornucopia, the transcendent balearic house of “Eclipse” is still pure class, beating most other electronic dance tracks currently out there.

Images from the Dubnobasswithmyheadman album booklet

Underworld and Tomato—the art and design collective formed by Hyde, Smith, John Warwicker, Simon Taylor, and others—also threw in some new artwork for the five-disc super deluxe edition reissue, including a 50-page large format enhancement of the original's forward-thinking album booklet.

Looking back to early 90s, it's clear that Tomato's communal artistic approach empowered Underworld to handle creative tasks that are now quite commonplace for musicians in the Internet age: art, graphic design, music production, live projections, videos, a personal record label (Tomato Records), and so on. Hyde and Warwicker even publishedMmm Skyscraper I Love You, a book tie-in for Dubnobasswithmyheadman.

As Hyde told The Creators Project, the twelve or so members who founded Tomato came together in the anything-goes London Soho of the time. Dance clubs and club nights were popping up left and right, as were pirate radio stations illegally broadcasting rave music to masses in the throes of chemical rapture. “I grew up with pirate radio stations that played the best music from America,” Hyde said. “I was hearing this fantastic music that was from my youth, early German music like Kraftwerk, Tangerine Dream, Neu!, and Can re-processed by these London kids making illegal broadcasts from their apartment blocks somewhere on the outskirts of town.” Left to right: Underworld's Karl Hyde, Darren Emerson, and Rick Smith. According to Hyde, spontaneous raves could find tens of thousands of people converging on a single location, delivering the promise punk never could: “Punk became subservient to the music industry,” Hyde recalled. “It offered rebellion and outsider culture but didn't' deliver it, whereas rave and dance culture didn't even promise it but delivered it.” For Underworld, who'd tried and failed for ten years to exist on the music industry's terms, this was home. They'd always been outsiders, and the UK's rave and dance culture felt like a place where they could just be themselves. And once they brought in the young and talented DJ Darren Emerson—who parted ways with Hyde and Smith in 2000—the pieces all fell into place.

Tomato's ranks were filled with musicians, artists, graphic designers, filmmakers, and even business people. As Hyde said, everyone had a profound influence on one another. Warwicker, who first met Hyde and Smith in the early 80s through a mutual friend, found true willing collaborators in the pair. By 1991 they'd truly coalesced, as Warwicker recalled, drawing inspiration from Soho's media village, where TV commercials and experimental films were being made.

Karl Hyde in New York City.

Tomato's first Underworld record sleeve came in the form of the "Mother Earth"/ “The Hump” 12-inch single (Tomato Records). For Dubnobasswithmyheadman sleeve, Warwicker assumed the role of “mixmaster” in a process that was both technologically analog and digital. “The digital was not as refined as it is now, and I guess that is as true with the music of the time,” Warwicker said. “I guess there was this collision and fight between the analog and digital.”

One of Tomato's favorite tools at the time, which found output on Dubnobasswithmyheadman, was a fax machine. These old Canon machines no longer accepted faxes, but if they were fed a message with an image to copy with Warwicker holding the sheet of paper back, the machine would start to draw lines and stretch words. “Guys were making these huge, long artworks made out of fax elements,” added Hyde. “It was like subverting technology at the time, which was what was going on in the studio with Underworld, too.”

Original handwritten lyrics courtesy of Karl Hyde.

Tomato members would also place big sheets of paper on the floor, according to Hyde, and then “jam on top of it, making marks, handprints, and splashes… and then cut it up and scan it into the Macs.” The collective would also incorporate Hyde's impressionistic text, which he was creating on a typewriter.

“It was a very physical process in those days at Tomato,” said Hyde. “The computer was just a way of tying it together. This [method] expanded into images that became part of of the advertising culture of the 90s that Tomato was part of creating.”

While Tomato's process was technological subversion, their artistic touchstones were more historical. At the time, computer-generated art was de rigueur, but Hyde was and still is inspired by New York-style abstract expressionism, especially Franz Klein's black and white paintings, where canvases were large and dynamic. For him, that sort of immensity equated to dance music.

“It was movement rendered in paint, which is a form of music” Hyde said. “Dance music is about physicality, about exuberance. I said, 'Let's make art that reflects that.'”

Underworld performing Dubnobasswithmyheadman live.

Tomato and Underworld undoubtedly succeeded on that front. The album sleeve and booklet swirl and dance with amorphous black and white shapes, textures, and Hyde's impressionistic urban poetry, gathered on his and Warwicker's New York City trips, where they saw the contrast knob turned up in full expressionistic style.

Hyde and Warwicker might downplay Dubnobasswithmyheadman's impact on dance music artwork, but it brought a nice dose of futurism to the culture and times. In fusing punk and other artistic and musical forms, Underworld and Tomato unwittingly lit the way to the multimedia future of music in the Internet age.

Click here to visit Underworld's website.

This article originally appeared on Noisey's sister site The Creator Project.