Seattle Mixtapes

DJ mixes and mixtapes from one of the Pacific Northwest's most distinctive electronic music scenes - digitized and restored from original cassette tape and CD recordings.

In the early 1990s, Seattle had one of the most unusual cultural positions of any American city: the grunge explosion was pulling the mainstream music world's attention northward, while simultaneously a thriving underground rave and electronic music scene was building in the city's warehouses and clubs. On any given Saturday night you could catch Nirvana or Alice in Chains at a Pioneer Square pub, then head off to whatever party was happening and stay long enough to watch the sunrise. Donald Glaude held a Friday residency at the Underground nightclub and frequently headlined at rave warehouse parties like NAF Studios in West Seattle, playing venues including The Power Plant, Vinylized, the Catwalk, and the Jungle - and along with DJ Dan's Funky Techno Tribe in San Francisco and Ron D Core in Los Angeles, helped define the West Coast house sound through the 1990s. Through the mid-1990s and into the 2000s Seattle had many different rave crews, promoters, DJs, and fans, and it was common to meet people who regularly traveled between Seattle and San Francisco, spreading the West Coast rave culture up and down the coast.

These tapes document a city that was building something real in the shadow of a grunge scene that got all the press. Restored from analog sources and archived here for the people who were there, and anyone curious what the Pacific Northwest underground actually sounded like.