Colorado Mixtapes

DJ mixes and mixtapes from one of the American underground's most passionate and self-contained regional scenes - digitized and restored from original cassette tape and CD recordings.

Denver's rave scene matured considerably from the early 1990s when police raids of underground parties were common, but that early adversity helped forge a community that was deeply committed to the music for its own sake. Promoter Ryan Dykstra had been a major part of thousands of shows across Colorado since 1993, and his name became one of the few synonymous with Colorado nightlife toward the turn of the century. On the production side, DJ Fury founded LowerWorld Productions and co-founded rave series like Skylab and Breakdown, helping establish Denver and Boulder as the seat of one of the nation's most active rave cultures. A New Year's Eve rave called Sands of Time in 1994 - set to be the largest rave in Colorado history, with DJs flown in from across the country - was shut down by local authorities before midnight, a moment that became a defining story of the scene's early struggle. Through it all, the Colorado underground kept going, building something that felt entirely its own. To those who lived it, the Denver scene felt insular in the best possible way - like it belonged to them, not to anywhere else.

These tapes document a scene that thrived far from the coasts and never needed anyone's permission to do so. Restored from analog sources and archived here for the people who were there, and anyone who's curious what the Rocky Mountain underground actually sounded like.