By: Lucas Fink By: Lucas Fink | August 11, 2022 | People, Lifestyle, Music, Party, Celebrity, Entertainment, Community,
It’s clear that Outside Lands knows how to appease the rave crowd. Each day of the festival’s 2022 iteration featured at least one major EDM/house artist headlining on one of its main stages, and if that proved insufficient, more traditional indoor club vibes pulsed 24/7 at the SOMA Tent, OSL’s dedicated rave refuge.
That Outside Lands takes pains to ensure its dance enthusiast demographic is well-cared for shouldn’t surprise; the Bay Area has long been a nucleus of electronica/dance music and was at the forefront of the rave movement in the mid 1990s. It’s doubly unsurprising, then, that NorCal has birthed many highly influential producers and DJs since house music’s meteoric ascension over the last couple of decades. Though any haughty electronica aesthete would be quick to point out that compiling a list of Bay Area electronic artists without enumerating the infinite number of subgenres that have emerged over the years would be sacrilege, we did so anyway. If you really want to delve into the nuanced differences between synth pop, trip hop, chill wave, and euphoric hard-style, here’s a complete breakdown.
Giraffage
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Charlie Yin - before assuming the stage name Giraffage - grew up in San Jose, California before studying political economics at the University of California, Berkeley. Yin’s unique brand of indie dance stylings straddles the boundary between R&B, trance, and ambient, lending his tracks a blissful, easy danceability without sacrificing any energetic momentum. His early 2016 cut “Bring Me Your Love” featuring THEA is a dreamy, driving sonic wonderland, and his 2017 collaboration with the ingenious indie artist Japanese Breakfast yielded the track “Maybes”, a euphoric trancestep piece that’s necessary listening for those exploring his discography.
Tycho
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Born in Sacramento and currently based in San Francisco, Scott Hansen has been innovating and altering the electronica landscape under the name Tycho since the early 2000s. His music blends post-rock instrumentation with downtempo chillwave sensibilities and guitar/percussion-heavy production of IDM (IDM stands for intelligent dance music, which is a wildly pretentious signifier used to refer to experimental, left-of-center dance electronica).
Anything off of his brilliant 2014 record Dive is worth checking out, specifically the chilled-but-readily-danceable “Dive” and the slower, stunning pseudo-ambient piece “A Walk”, which will make any stroll - be it through a rainy suburban street or down a sun-soaked beach - thoroughly magical.
DJ Shadow
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Legendary producer DJ Shadow - also known as Joshua Paul Davis - was born in San Jose and attended high school in Davis, California, where he became a disc jockey for U.C. Davis’s college radio station in the early 1990s. Over the next 30 years, Shadow would join the ranks of J Dilla and Madlib as one of the pioneers of instrumental hip hop and trip hop. His first full-length album Endtroducing - released in 1996 - is equal parts funky and frenetic, especially the track “Building Steam with a Grain of Salt”. In 2016, he produced the electrifying, unyieldingly scathing track “Nobody Speak” for the storied hip hop duo Run the Jewels.
Bassnectar
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Lorin Ashton was born in Santa Cruz in 1978 and - during his childhood - experienced a minor earthquake that he claims revealed to him the sublime force of bass. After growing up in the South Bay suburb Los Gatos and studying music and U.C. Santa Cruz, Ashton - under the name Bassnectar - seized upon that earthquake inspiration and with it created some of the most influential dubstep and liquid drum and bass of the 2010s. The title track of his seminal record Timequake is a psychedelic cut ripe for raving, and his remix of Ellie Goulding’s “Lights” overflows with molten, oozing bass melodies.
Illenium
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Illenium, also known as Nicholas D. Miller was raised in San Francisco and attended St. Ignatius College Preparatory. Miller shared in an interview that he was motivated to pursue a career in electronic music production after seeing Bassnectar perform at Red Rocks Amphitheater in Denver in 2012. While admittedly more pop-oriented than other artists featured here - frequently collaborating with names like iann dior, X Ambassadors, Jon Bellion, and Trippie Redd - his marriage of trap, future bass, and poppy dubstep generates some undeniably catchy tracks. The bass drop on the choppy metal dubstep “Feel Something (Will I Prevail)” is particularly impressive. Oh, and he just headlined Outside Lands 2022.
Mark Farina
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Mark Farina - the only artist on this list without a stage name - is a San Francisco-based DJ and producer who was at the nexus of the Bay Area’s house music scene in the 1990s and 2000s. He co-founded and operated a club in San Francisco for three years in the mid 1990s thanks to which his signature brand of “mushroom jazz” amassed a following. “Mushroom jazz” is Farina’s own hypnotic sonic concoction, fusing elements of acid jazz and house with trip hop-adjacent percussion. Farina continues to play numerous shows every year, some of which are rumored to bump into the wee hours of the morning at almost 8 hours in length.
“Midnight Calling” is a hazy downtempo track made well-suited for lounging on a couch in the club and people watching, and “Best of Both Worlds” is a more typical house track certain to keep everyone 2-stepping until the club closes.
See also: 6 Underground Bay Area Indie Bands To Discover And Fall In Love With
Photography by: Tim Mosenfelder/Getty Images