San Francisco Bay Area Mixtapes
DJ mixes and mixtapes from one of America's most celebrated regional dance music scenes, San Francisco, digitized and restored from original cassette tape and CD recordings.
San Francisco had a dance music culture unlike anywhere else in the country. The city was widely considered the mecca of the American rave scene - rooted in psychedelia, counterculture, and a genuine love of the music. It all kicked off in earnest around 1991, with ToonTown throwing a legendary New Year's Eve party in the city's Design District and the Wicked crew setting up their decks on Baker Beach for the first of their famous Full Moon parties.
The Hardkiss brothers - Scott, Gavin, and Robbie - ruled the underground club scene in the early 90s with a mixture of acid, progressive house, deep house, tribal, and breakbeats, running their own Hardkiss label and helping define a sound that was uniquely San Francisco. Meanwhile, Chicago-born Mark Farina built a cult following in the city with his Mushroom Jazz parties, and crews like Sunset Sound System and Friends & Family became pillars of the scene with an unwavering dedication to quality music in unique settings.
This playlist collects mixes that originated from San Francisco, Oakland, and the broader Bay Area, documents of a regional scene that deserves to be remembered and heard. Restored from analog sources and archived here for the people who were there, and the ones who wish they had been.
