Underground Sound of Lisbon (sometimes shortened to USL) was a collaboration between Portuguese house music producers Rui da Silva (then known as Doctor J) and DJ Vibe (real name Tó Pereira). It was active between 1993 and 2001.
The duo started working together in 1993 by founding Kaos Records, the first Portuguese electronic music label, with promoter António Cunha. They released their first record as Underground Sound of Lisbon, "Chapter One", in 1994, although by this time they signed their production work as LHT (Lisbon Hard Team).
Still, the USL moniker became more famous after the track "So Get Up", a hard tribal anthem with spoken word apocalyptic comments by rapper Darin Pappas (better known by his stage name Ithaka, but credited here as Korvowrong), received airplay in New York clubs at the hands of DJ Danny Tenaglia, which lead to a worldwide release at the Tribal America label. They also produced a track with house diva Celeda on the vocals.
In 1998, USL contributed "Hailwa Yenge Oike Mbela" to the AIDS benefit compilation album Onda Sonora: Red Hot + Lisbon produced by the Red Hot Organization.
By the late 90s their tribal house sound morphed into a more progressive and dreamy vibe. After the release of their final album, Etnocity, the duo officially split, as both artists wanted to branch out into other fields and work with other producers. Silva relocated to London, where he set up Kismet Records, while Vibe continued to tour worldwide and began working with up-and-coming Portuguese producers.
Read more about Underground Sound Of Lisbon: NYLX
Famous quotes containing the words underground and/or sound:
“An underground grower, blind and a common brown;
Got a misshapen look, it’s nudged where it could;
Simple as soil yet crowded as earth with all.”
—Richard Wilbur (b. 1921)
“A village seems thus, where its able-bodied men are all plowing the ocean together, as a common field. In North Truro the women and girls may sit at their doors, and see where their husbands and brothers are harvesting their mackerel fifteen or twenty miles off, on the sea, with hundreds of white harvest wagons, just as in the country the farmers’ wives sometimes see their husbands working in a distant hillside field. But the sound of no dinner-horn can reach the fisher’s ear.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)