What is a preservationist to do when someone drops off a plastic grocery bag full of 30-year-old cassettes created by some of San Francisco's most influential DJs? Digitize them, of course.
That's exactly what Jim Hopkins at the SF Disco Preservation Society is doing. The bag is a treasure trove of the tastes and beats of the 1980s and 1990s, played at some of the city's coolest venues, many of which no longer exist. Via SFist:
The art of the club mix — equal parts curation, imagination, and rhythmic skill — is something that's evolved over the decades in different ways in different cities, with DJs finding influences both locally and internationally. But before the explosion of file-sharing in the early 2000s and the widespread accessibility of digitized music a few years later, DJ sets were things you only ever experienced live in the nightclubs themselves, unless your friend was a DJ and copied a cassette for you — or unless that DJ was famous enough to have a record label and a few CDs.
Hopkins wants people who went to SF nightclubs like Pleasuredome, the I-Beam, and the EndUp back in the day to be able to hear some of these multi-hour mixes that they may only have the haziest memories of, and he wants to introduce a new generation of DJs and nightlife mavens to the talents of their forebears.
Here's a terrific late-80s techno trance mix:
DJ Michael Dianella – Late 80s Techno
If the gay scene is more to your liking, this will take you back to when Whitney was as inescapable as Beyonce is now:
DJ Mark Watkins at Castro Station, 1987 (warning: unironic RickRoll at 59:00
• Longtime SF DJ Builds Online Archive Of '80s And '90s Club Mixes From Long-Gone Nightclubs
Image: Pascal Terjan
