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Motor City Drum Ensemble & Jeremy Underground

The triumph of the Crate Diggers

By Sergio Pulido 11.06.18

A "crate digger" is, according to the multiple slang dictionaries that can be found online, a specialist in searching out second-hand records in drawers and boxes. They are those music lovers who aren’t looking for either the latest fashion craze or the newest record releases, their thing is searching out those forgotten jewels or little known sounds to the Western public. They can often be seen at album fairs, garage sales or flea-markets and are capable of spending hours and hours in search of that unknown treasure that deserves a second chance.

Take for example the world of DJs and producers, and the case of the very successful album "Endtroducing" (1996) made by DJ Shadow, an album made entirely using samples of somewhat dark or unknown subjects that was a best seller in its time and changed the way of making music using sampling. Its cover featured two young guys in a record store looking for ... records. For some years now the figure of the DJ crate digger has become popular, and this is the main thing about the German Danilo Plessow, better known as the Motor City Drum Ensemble, and the Frenchman Jeremy Underground: specialists in finding submerged pearls. And when one of their unearthed tracks gets popular again, it’s not uncommon that the price of the original album goes through the stratosphere in online websites like Discogs. So having these two gentlemen together on the decks Back2Back becomes a competition to see who has better taste, who can surprise us more; and we can expect anything: disco, funk, house, soul, techno, world music, Africa, Cuba, everything is fair game for these two guys, everything is possible if we give ourselves over to these champions of music to discover.

Motor City Drum Ensemble & Jeremy Underground will perform between 5 and 7 am at Sónar de Nit on Saturday, June 16th this weekend.

  • Motor City Drum Ensemble & Jeremy Underground
  • The 16 June
  • Sónar Noche
  • Fira Barcelona - L'Hospitalet de Llobregat
  • www.sonar.es