The New Club Counterculture
ISOKNOCK & the Role of the Undergroundby Kai La Forte B’28published 11/20/25
ISOKNOCK & the Role of the Undergroundby Kai La Forte B’28published 11/20/25
Electronic music is inseparable from my childhood. As a kid, odds were that I could be found cranking festival livestreams on wired earbuds, phone speakers, or the biggest sound system I could find. When I wasn’t doing that, I was at concerts, producing music, descending into my hometown’s punk underground, or spamming spotify links to my closest friends. While my immediate community could never have understood my fanaticism, I knew that I’d eventually find my way into the scene, enveloped by its characteristic electric crowds, searing bass lines, and PLUR.
Five years ago, however, I witnessed the ego death of dance music. With a mainstream saturated by future bass and progressive house, radio waves plagued by shameless samples and covers, and emerging subgenres crowded out by new-wave “briddim,” audiences grew fatigued. Revered DJs rapidly fell from grace. Record labels collapsed. Bass music fans across the U.S. watched helplessly with kandi-adorned hands clasped and a single common fear in mind: “dubstep is dead.”
The period from 2015 to 2021 marks the first time that dance music truly became overexposed. The very structural foundations of the genre bent under the weight of its own significance; born in the warehouses of a Berlin strangled by the Cold War, the gay bars of New York at the height of AIDS-crisis stigmatization, the beaches of Ibiza, and the diverse subterranean bars of Chicago and Detroit, the genre has always been firmly rooted in a rich cultural underground. It might come as a surprise, then, that at the very pinnacle of dance music’s popularity, there existed a key fact which the industry seemed to forget: rave culture was never just about fame or flashing lights. It was about rebellion.
It’s no surprise, then, that as the mainstream community folded, the underground doubled down on chaos.
The revolution emerged in SoCal, 2020. LA-based organizer Brownies & Lemonade led the charge, pining to keep the renegade flame of dance music alight: illegal pop-ups, secret lineups, addresses released only hours before events, and — most importantly — cutting-edge emerging talent. Since garnering the attention of dance music legends Skrillex, Diplo, and many others in 2017, BNL has been poised to launch the careers of dance music’s rising stars.
Meanwhile, two kids from San Diego — Julian “ISOxo” Isorena and Richard “Knock2” Nakhonethap — were quickly gathering a cult following. The two represented a significant departure from the wall-of-noise dubstep and PLUR-music future bass that tyrannized the airwaves; the two’s tight drums, ground-shaking bass lines, jaw-dropping hooks, and hip-hop inspired production turned the heads of DJs and executives everywhere, including those behind Sable Valley Records, 88rising, and most importantly, Brownies & Lemonade. In 2020, at BNL’s small virtual “Digital Mirage” music festivals, ISOKNOCK was born.
By 2021, ISOxo’s “Nightrealm” and Knock2’s “2HEARTs” EPs — as well as the viral single “dashstar*” — shook dancefloors across America. Fans quickly recognized the new underground movement taking shape surrounding the two DJs, especially as their collaborative remix LP “niteharts” dropped in October of 2022. In the time since, raucous crowds have turned up to ISOxo’s genre-defying “kidsgonemad!” and Knock2’s “ROOM202” and debut LP “nolimit,” as well as the brilliantly diverse co-produced LP “ISOKNOCK 4EVR.” In 2025, the two launched Niteharts Festival, a two-day-long feast for dance music fans everywhere, featuring Skrillex and Zedd along with other stars and up-and-comers.
The festival’s tens of thousands of available tickets sold within a minute of release.
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In the ample time I’ve spent immersing myself in the dance music scene, I’ve seen everything from viral smash-hits to the collapses of whole subgenres and factions. But never before have I seen a movement within dance so groundbreaking nor so necessary. As mainstream fervor stagnated, pop and bass stars struggled to cling to fame, and industry power became increasingly centralized, electronic music found itself in the midst of an identity crisis; for a genre with roots so deep in underground subculture, the destruction of the genre’s novelty was nothing short of shocking.
Rather than adopting for themselves the “play it safe” mentality that rocked the airwaves, ISOxo and Knock2 blazed their own trails, helping to resurrect the long-dormant subgenres of trap, bass house, and hard techno in what could only be described as a renaissance. But while the sounds were new, they were well-explored; the two musicians’ music alone fails to explain the genre-defining cult stardom which surrounded them so quickly.
In the case of ISOxo and Knock2, the music itself was less important than the movement that the two DJs represented. ISOKNOCK was a counterculture revolution against the emerging norms of corporatization and creative quiescence that plagued the dance music industry. It was a push for greater representation for AAPI artists in a scene dominated by white men. But most importantly, it was proof that two twenty-something nobodies from the streets of San Diego with nothing but laptops, big dreams, and a love for the game could define a generation of fans. It was a shift back to the struggle, democracy, and disobedience which defined dance music at its inception, and represented a revival of the bottom-up model that always gave the genre — and the culture — a unique edge. ISOKNOCK wasn’t about fame or flashing lights.
ISOKNOCK was about rebellion.