Dear indie friends,

There's something bittersweet about late May, the season when we lose giants and celebrate their legacies in the same breath. This week, we've watched the jazz world reckon with the passing of Sonny Rollins, a true last giant of the form, while simultaneously marking Miles Davis's centennial… reminders that the lineage of innovation lives on in the hands and hearts of musicians who came after.

These aren't just historical moments; they're openings. They ask us what it means to inherit a sound, to resist forgetting. That spirit of resistance feels urgent right now. Across the music world, artists are pushing back against erasure in different forms, from Madagascar to Brussels, creators are defending their voices against both algorithmic theft and monopolistic gatekeeping.

And closer to home, Belgium's electronic music community is having difficult, necessary conversations about who gets to shape the culture we love. A new collective has called out the monopolisation of Brussels's electronic music scene, but independence isn't just an aesthetic choice, it's a structural one. This edition lands in that space where memory meets resistance, where we honor what's been built while asking hard questions about who builds next.

A collective has stepped forward to challenge what they're calling the "monopolization" of Brussels's electronic music sector. The movement highlights a growing tension in a city that gave the world Belgian New Beat, acid house pioneers, and some of Europe's most influential techno architects.

It's a familiar paradox: the places that incubate cutting-edge culture often become calcified once they've achieved international prestige. Brussels's electronic scene, built on decades of underground innovation, from early industrial experimenters to the rave generation that shaped contemporary dance music, risks becoming a closed system where access and opportunity concentrate in fewer hands.

What makes this moment significant isn't just the complaint itself, but where it's coming from. Electronic music culture has always thrived on openness, remix, and remix culture. The irony of gatekeeping in a genre built on sampling, borrowing, and collective creation isn't lost on anyone paying attention. This tension reflects a larger question Belgium's creative sectors are grappling with:

How do you preserve and protect a cultural legacy while keeping the doors open for the next generation of makers?

The electronic music world is watching to see if Brussels, my city of heart, with the credibility to lead on these questions, can model a different answer.

There's a particular kind of courage in organizing a music festival during a fuel shortage. Not the courage of soldiers or activists, something quieter, more stubborn. It's the courage of saying: This matters. We're doing this anyway.

Cuba Disco just concluded its 2026 edition in Havana, and the image is almost surreal in our moment. An intergenerational crowd gathering for a week of concerts while the country grinds through economic crisis. Young people dancing to reparto, the homegrown reggaeton sound that's become Cuba's defiant heartbeat, while the infrastructure around them fractures. The festival persisted, not because the circumstances improved, but because the organizers understood something fundamental about human survival: we don't need prosperity to need music.

Sometimes we need it more. This is a lesson that reverberates far beyond Havana. The independent music ecosystem, whether in Havana or Brussels or anywhere else, thrives not in spite of constraint but often because of it. Constraint forces invention.

When you can't buy your way to a sound, you build it from what's at hand. Cuba's musical genius has always emerged from exactly this paradox: isolation breeding innovation, scarcity breeding style. There's something almost defiant about the indie spirit that Cuba Disco embodies. The festival held firm despite deepening fuel shortages and economic strain, insisting that cultural moments remain non-negotiable even when material resources dwindle.

There's dignity in that.

And yet, here's where it gets interesting for those of us watching from Europe, and especially from Belgium. The Belgian influence on global indie culture is subtle but real, woven through decades of electronic experimentation, post-punk aesthetics, and a particular kind of democratic DIY ethos. When we watch other countries protect their cultural moments, we might ask: what are we protecting? What are we building in our own scenes? The independent music world lives in the gaps between systems. It exists in the spaces where major labels see no profit margin, where streaming playlists won't algorithmically sort you, where the only currency that matters is whether someone in a room will move to your sound.

It's the realm of the underground, yes, but "underground" doesn't mean powerless. Some of the most influential music of the past fifty years emerged from underground spaces. From the post-punk basements of Brussels to the reggaeton streets of Havana, the pattern repeats: constraint breeds authenticity, and authenticity builds community.

What makes indie music matter, I mean, really matter, beyond nostalgia or aesthetic preference, is that it represents a form of cultural autonomy. When Wampi takes the stage at Cuba Disco, he's not performing for shareholders or quarterly earnings reports. He's part of a chain of transmission, a moment where music becomes a collective act of survival and joy. That's not trivial. That's everything.

The philosophy of indie culture, if we can call it that, is a philosophy of refusal. Refusal to accept that culture should be rationalized, monetized, streamlined into algorithm-friendly formats. Refusal to believe that a song's worth is measured by its streaming numbers. Refusal to surrender the commons to the marketplace. It's a stance that looks naive until you realize it's actually radical, and maybe necessary.

For those of us in Belgium and beyond, watching Cuba Disco persist through crisis should inspire a kind of recognition. We're in the same lineage of artists and audiences who believe that culture is essential infrastructure, not luxury. That a festival in Havana and an underground club in Brussels and a bedroom producer in any small town are all part of the same conversation: we will make beauty despite everything. That's the real story. Not the crisis, not the fuel shortage… those are just weather. The story is the persistence. The story is people showing up.

With love from Brussels,

Mitxoda

This week’s Top 10 isn’t about winning prizes, it’s about love, support, and staying in it together.

Every Friday at 4:00 PM (Brussels time) a new episode of Le Salon Indie de Mitxoda will take place on salon.mitxoda.be, don’t miss it.

Thank you for spending this week with us at Le Salon. Whether you found yourself drawn to the resilience of cultural spaces or moved by the legacies of giants like Miles Davis and Sonny Rollins, you've witnessed something vital: artists refusing to be silenced, communities refusing to forget. The work of supporting indie creators matters now more than ever. See you next week.

With love, always,
🖤 Mitxoda

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