Texas Mixtapes

DJ mixes and mixtapes from the Lone Star State - spanning Dallas, Houston, Austin, and beyond - digitized and restored from original cassette tape and CD recordings.

Texas has a deeper connection to electronic music history than most people realize, and it starts in Dallas. The Starck Club - a sleek converted warehouse designed by French architect Philippe Starck - was one of the first places in America where house and acid house found an early audience, and is widely noted as one of the first venues where MDMA became popular as a dance drug. When the Starck closed in 1989, DJs like Greg Watton and GoGo Mike DuPriest had already built a massive following for house music in Dallas, and the Lizard Lounge picked up where it left off when it opened at the end of 1991, with warehouse parties taking the scene further underground. The Dallas connection to Detroit runs deeper still - according to local legend, Juan Atkins named his famous Detroit techno label Metroplex after the Dallas-Fort Worth conurbation, thanks to the popularity of his early Cybotron hit "Clear" in the region's roller rinks. Meanwhile in Austin, Kerry Jaggers - widely credited for bringing the rave scene to Austin - went on to establish venues across the country including Houston's Rich's and San Francisco's 1015 Folsom, and in Houston and Dallas, larger events were drawing tens of thousands and bringing in national talent as the decade progressed.

These tapes document a state with a rich and largely untold electronic music history. Restored from analog sources and archived here for the people who were there, and anyone who's been sleeping on Texas.