Mark Farina

Mark Farina grew up in Chicago and started DJing at 16, landing a residency at the city's all-ages club Medusa's. He met Derrick Carter at a Chicago record store in the late 1980s, and the two became close collaborators as Farina developed a style that mixed Chicago house with downtempo, acid jazz, and hip-hop, a sound he sold on cassette through Gramophone Records, where he worked.

In 1992 he and Patty Ryan started Mushroom Jazz, a weekly club night in San Francisco that grew from about 100 people to several hundred within a couple of years. Om Records released the first Mushroom Jazz mix CD in 1996, and the series continued for two decades. URB, Muzik, and BPM magazines all named him to their lists of the world's top DJs, and in 2000 DJ Mag ranked him No. 72 on its Top 100 DJs list.