Baltimore-Washington Mixtapes

DJ mixes and mixtapes from one of the most underrated dance music corridors on the East Coast - spanning Baltimore and Washington DC, digitized and restored from original cassette tape and CD recordings.

"The DC/Baltimore rave scene was probably the healthiest, strongest, and biggest on the East Coast," according to Scott Herman, who made his career managing DC's legendary Buzz parties. It started in Baltimore, where Scott Henry rented a Baltimore loft to host Warehouse Rave 1 in December 1990, brought in partners Charles Feelgood and Tony Japzon to continue the warehouse vibe at the Orbit parties in early 1991, and eventually launched Fever - a seminal rave that ran from 1992 to 2001 out of the Paradox, a concrete warehouse under an overpass in a desolate stretch of the city, and became the heartbeat of Baltimore club culture for a decade. Buzz, founded in 1993 and anchored at DC's Capital Ballroom - later Nation - drew early headliners like Moby, Frankie Bones, Josh Wink, and Little Louie Vega, and was voted Best Party four years running by electronic dance music magazine URB. Running parallel to all of it was a homegrown Baltimore sound entirely distinct from the rave circuit: Baltimore club music, created in the early 1990s by Frank Ski, Scottie B, Shawn Caesar, DJ Technics, and others - a breakbeat-driven genre fusing house, hip hop, and Miami bass that spread up and down the East Coast through mix tapes carried by traveling Baltimore DJs.

These tapes document a region that built something genuinely world-class in the shadows of the bigger coastal cities - and never got nearly enough credit for it. Restored from analog sources and archived here for the record.