Chicago Mixtapes
DJ mixes and mixtapes from the city where house music was born - digitized and restored from original cassette tape and CD recordings.
Everything starts here. In 1977, Frankie Knuckles took up residence at a former factory in Chicago's West Loop neighborhood called The Warehouse, playing a creative mix of disco, funk, and European synth music spliced with drum machines - and the music that took its name from that club went on to become a worldwide phenomenon. Knuckles later moved on to found the Powerplant, and DJ Ron Hardy took over at what became known as the Music Box, continuing to push the sound forward. Out of that same South Side scene came the Chosen Few - a collective of DJs who carried the torch for Chicago's underground house sound through the 1990s and whose annual picnic grew to draw thousands, becoming one of the most enduring traditions in American dance music. Labels like Trax Records and DJ International were instrumental in spreading Chicago house to New York, Detroit, and eventually into the British pop charts, cementing the city's place at the center of the global house music story. Meanwhile, Smartbar - the tiny Wrigleyville basement club that opened in 1982 with Frankie Knuckles as its first DJ - remained a cornerstone of the scene, nurturing the next generation of Chicago talent for decades to come.
These tapes document the city that built the foundation everyone else built on. Essential listening, full stop.
![Miles Maeda - きく[Kiku] (1997)](https://i.ytimg.com/vi/OMe_DJB5g2Q/hqdefault.jpg)
