Partygoers tiptoe through fields of long prairie grass and jump over fences, using a flashlight to guide them through the dark. They scurry through tunnels and step into the warmth of a packed, dancing crowd. The outside chill fades. Techno music swells, and laser lights bounce off the graffitied walls of the cement underpass turned into Calgary’s coolest nightclub.
For those like Levi Stoddard, DJ and co-founder of Rotterdam-based record label Night Format, these tunnel raves are a nod to an earlier underground dance culture. Stoddard began raving in the mid-90s, an era of unvarnished warehouse venues with pioneering techno sounds flooding in from overseas. These renegade parties were unique: find a space, haul in a sound system and build the party yourself. With this guerrilla mentality, Stoddard began coordinating these parties in Calgary through his company Fat Beats Inc.
“We used to throw raves here in Calgary. We would go out and do renegades when we couldn’t find a location, so that whole concept comes from back in the day,” says Stoddard. “There was a tunnel just right by the Max Bell [station] that we threw parties in and could do them for free.”
In November 2024, Stoddard joined UnderRealm, an event organizing company and music collective. It was through his involvement that he met fellow DJ and future business partner, Brendan Blakeman. Fatefully meeting through UnderRealm, Stoddard and Blakeman then started their own record label together, Night Format. Since then, the duo have put on four raves in a handful of Calgary underpasses, populating the tunnels with hundreds of attendees at every single event.
While renegade parties aren’t an entirely new phenomenon, the spirit and savvy do-it-yourself nature of organizing them remains important to the operation. Opting for more unconventional venues offers UnderRealm the ability to coordinate events on their own terms. “The tunnels are the most underground you can get without being in a basement,” says Stoddard.
Without typical resources offered by traditional venues, a deliberate amount of planning goes into event management. From scouting spaces to renting equipment and generators, the whole atmosphere of the function is considered, despite how guerrilla the raves generally appear. The safety of its party-goers is the first priority. UnderRealm hires its own security and is ardent about cleaning before and after using the spaces.
“We clean out the random bricks, garbage, and spray paint cans. We clean all that up, we throw our event, and then we clean it all up again. Hopefully, returning it to a better state than what we had,” says Stoddard.
However, larger external factors continue to create barriers for event organizers to host events like the tunnel parties. The Extended Dance Event Bylaw regulates rave events, requiring a license and compliance with noise, security and medical controls. The bylaw requirements, implemented in the early 2000s, make the cost of event hosting unsustainable and price out many grassroots organizers.
Despite the costs, the overarching ethos for UnderRealm acts primarily to serve its community. “We’ve gone into debt for the company. It’s the love of the game,” says Stoddard. “It’s building the community, and we want to bring [over] these DJs from overseas that we’re inspired by.”
UnderRealm hopes to bring international acts to a local audience, with connections through their music collective and record label bridging gaps to promoters all over the country and Europe. The tunnel raves have become a welcome platform for techno and EDM fans alike to engage with the music, with many Calgarians wanting to get in on these raves too. While the earliest events circulated through an invite-only chat of roughly 250 people, word has since spread. Now, hundreds of people attend, and one tunnel party even drew an estimated 700 people.
For Stoddard, these headcounts do little to define the underground — or even the tunnels. “Underground is not music, it’s the community,” he says. His definition is a community that takes care of itself, polices itself and expects the people within it to give something back.
“We are not a tunnel rave company,” says Stoddard. “We are just trying to make sure that [music] is coming here so that everybody can enjoy what’s coming up.”
For information on upcoming events, check out @the.underrealm on Instagram.
