“Yo, you here for the squat?” a child asks from a bunch dancing outdoors a constructing one evening to London-based photographer Aiyush Pachnanda, colloquially generally known as Yushy. Drawn in by the bottom shaking with the pressure of the bass, he and his digital camera step inside. That likelihood encounter would take his life and work in a completely new, unplanned route. “Over the years, a story started to take shape,” he says. “Documenting it kept me sane in many ways, and made me more empathetic toward the people I met in that world.”
These years of exploration, from 2022 to 2025, have been anthologised in his upcoming photobook Section 63: Underground & Unmasked – Documenting Underground London Raves (revealed by Velocity Press). Section 63 refers back to the notorious 1994 Criminal Justice and Public Order Act, launched in response to the increase of the UK’s free celebration motion within the early 90s and headed with the road: “powers to remove persons attending for or preparing for a rave.” Despite the federal government’s decades-long crackdown, these communities have endured, and in at present’s harsher political local weather, the starvation for the DIY spirit of dance music feels stronger than ever.
“I think club spaces are uniquely cathartic,” Yushy says. “Being in these spaces helps grow both individuality and a sense of community. You can be alone in a club, but you will still be with people who care about the space you’re in.” With the web development cycles flattening subcultures into one amorphous counterculture, he wonders if one thing important has been misplaced. “These spaces are special for anyone, regardless of music or location.”
“Clubs are closing at an alarming rate,” Yushy reminds us, with 65 UK clubs being shut down just in the last year, partially as a result of rising prices. “What we are seeing is a shift of people wanting a sense of community that, because of everything being so mainstream, just doesn’t exist.” His personal expertise of clubbing has been diversified, beginning out carrying shirts at native high-street golf equipment to sweaty basement raves in his days learning photojournalism on the University of South Wales, after which onto large warehouse raves and festivals. “I do miss a small club, personally – they are by far the best!”
Originally, Yushy dreamed of doing vogue and filmmaking at school, however fortunately fell into pictures by mistake. Inspired by Ewen Spencer, Simon Wheatley and even Nan Goldin, his fly-on-the-wall type captures each the uncooked vitality of the occasions he attends and the personalities inside them, making it laborious to think about his work by no means current. “My best advice is to move and shoot. You move, adapting to the light, documenting what matters to you. Whether that’s your mates in the loos, to photographing what is left on the floors: it all matters.”
“One thing I found myself photographing a lot was intimacy between people; whether that’s people sharing a cig or two people kissing in a disused warehouse,” he provides. “Empty hallways in abandoned commercial blocks, the sound systems, an old 2006 calendar hanging on the wall, the condensation on the windows, it all makes for great context.”
Since beginning the ebook, he reveals that he finds himself more and more concerned with the extra business facet of the pictures enterprise, and the conflicted feeling of navigating that world whereas nonetheless being authentically rooted within the underground. “What’s interesting is that I’ve started to see similarities in both spaces,” he admits. “There’s a real appetite for the rawness and energy of the underground, but often without the realities that come with it. At the same time, parts of the underground are seeking more visibility and accessibility, flirting with the mainstream in ways that can feel both exciting and complicated.”
The ebook’s cowl got here from a second Yushy spent looking for the placement of a rave. “It was a hot August week, and I’d been sent details to head to a local train station and ‘await further information’ about where the rave would be,” he says of this basic pre-rave situation. “After a while, a few others showed up – all waiting for the same thing. Suddenly, we all received the same message: a what3words location.”
“I started making my way there, heading toward a motorway flyover. As I got closer, I could hear the faint sound of trance music drifting between the cars overhead. I turned around and there was a group of people following me, who had apparently been behind me for a while. It felt like something out of a strange dream, almost like I was the Pied Piper. I snapped a photo of them laughing and joking as they walked past me to the sound of the music. That became the image for the cover.”
Yushy’s debut photobook is revealed by Velocity Press in October and is offered to pre-order here. The accompanying exhibition can be held at The Farsight Gallery (4-6 Flitcroft Street, London, WC2H 8DJ) and can run from 3-9 September, 2025.
