As San Francisco undergoes a painful demographic shift, musicians from a variety of genres have retreated to the cheaper rent and more relaxed noise ordinance enforcement of Oakland and other surrounding cities. But San Francisco's electronic music scene, able to adapt to its audience before crumbling, has remained in the city in part by catering to a new and wealthier fan base — techies.
"Where the fuck did all these things all come from," Chris Orr, who has been DJing for the last 25 years, questioned aloud as he looked over his new smartphone's complete contact list. "I guess the cloud or whatever? I mean, it's nice, but how the fuck are they in there?"
As a longtime resident of the Bay Area, Orr has witnessed the changing demographics of the DJ and electronic music scene firsthand.
"Yeah, I wish it was still '97 but it's not. You can embrace the change, leave, or lash out at young kids who moved here for better opportunity — and I think that's nearsighted," Orr said of the new, techie crowds coming to DJ shows. "I use some of the products they produce."
Orr has seen the DJ scene go through changes before. In the mid-'90s there was the large rave scene that served as a tip-of-the-iceberg entry point for kids to get interested in electronic music. Some of those kids (the more hardcore ones) would investigate further and find themselves embedded in the underground house and techo scenes.
Techno, although now commonly associated with Europeans overdosing on Ecstasy, is American music, invented by black working-class kids in and around Detroit. But the hip-hop DJs, graffiti, breakdancing, and weekday all-night techo raves of the '90s have waned in recent years, replaced by EDM, such pressure-release valves for techies as Burning Man, and parties that (sometimes) have crowds going home before 10 p.m.
Orr misses the opportunity to go see DJs like Mix Master Mike, Apollo, or Shortkut visiting the city's hip-hop DJ scene. Back then, the performers, and crowds, were as diverse and eclectic as the city. Orr, like several other DJs I spoke to, was upset about bands leaving for places like Oakland or L.A. He also voiced concern that the electronic music that survives has become increasingly homogeneous.
"Electronic music has become too white," Orr said. "I don't know what that reflects exactly, but a lot of the innovators were black."
And these new technically minded Bay Area residents aren't just becoming fans of the music — they're also creating it.
Atish Mehta, 31, quit his job as a software engineer at Facebook three weeks ago to try DJing full time. He has spent the last two years working on the Facebook messenger app. Now he's making spreadsheets with his projected earnings as a DJ.
"If everything goes as planned, and I hit all my goals, I'll take an 80 percent pay cut — and that's not including stock options," Mehta said. "I'm the happiest I've ever been in my entire life."
Mehta had been DJing part time for about four and a half years. He was first exposed to the underground DJ scene when he moved to San Francisco in 2007 and a close friend started bringing him to illegal parties. The subtlety and restraint of the underground DJs, and a culture that put art ahead of profit, spoke to him — but it was tough getting momentum DJing part time.
"Now that I quit my job I can do a lot more internationally," Mehta said. "Before, I had to say no to gigs; like when I'd go to Europe I'd have to say, 'Sorry, I just don't have enough vacation days.'"
He has been playing around with the idea of going full time for years, but as demand for his DJing sets increase (he plays Coachella this weekend), he finally took the plunge.
"I can always come back to software, even if I take a two- or three- year break to do music. In the big span of a software engineer's career that's not a lot of time," Mehta said, getting reflective. "There's this quote from this Orbital track that says, 'It's better to regret something you have done than something you haven't done.' I don't want to go to my grave wondering, 'What if?'"
Like many things, programming can be an art, too; it's expressive and stylistic. Coding a Facebook messenger app, according to Mehta, is very similar to his creating a mix: He meticulously combs over tiny details preparing a product for a large audience of users. With the discipline he learned from his engineering career, he sometimes obsesses over the same five-minute transition for weeks.
Mehta also created an iPad app that enables him to access his entire library of music more quickly, something he finds important while improvising sets and taking his crowds on a journey.
"Even with art being a very right-brain thing, you can still have a very left-brain, analytical approach to seeing where it fits in the big picture," he said.
Jimmy B, a DJ born and raised in the Bay Area, recently played a Morning Gloryville event — an alcohol-free Wednesday morning party geared towards tech-industry workers looking to start off their day in a healthy way. He's DJed in the Bay Area for longer than he's willing to admit, and has seen the changes firsthand.
"Before it was street artists, skaters, and students. Now it's all work-oriented people with more expendable income," he said of the people attending parties in the city. It's a change that some musical genres have found hard to adapt to, but many DJs have been able to find a new place within the landscape.
"I've had people say waking up and going to this [Morning Gloryville]event had them buzzed throughout their workday," Jimmy B said. "The tech industry has a lot of smart people and I see these events as a way of the tech industry saying, 'We don't just want pencil pushers working all the time.'"
According to Jimmy B, the member of the Morning Gloryville team responsible for booking DJs has a connection to the underground techno and house scenes, which gives the parties an air of legitimacy.
Morning Gloryville is an almost-accidental interaction among the different worlds that the Gray Area Foundation, a nonprofit group that aims to bring tech, art, and music minds together in the city, touts in its mission statement. According to another DJ, some members of the Gray Area are using the event as a dry run for the event planning and music production products they are creating.
"There's an insane volume of shows now, in big part because of the people moving to the Bay Area, and more money — obviously," Mattie Bowen, a DJ who plays Detroit-style techno and house, said. "There's a huge influx of people who want to just go party. You can feel it. Five years ago we were doing underground shows with 100 people; now we fill Public Works with bigger headliners fairly regularly. It's hard to find a space to dance sometimes on weekends."
The weekday night shows, once frequented by creative, artistic crowds, according to many DJs, are seeing smaller crowds. And some DJs who are unable, unwilling, or uninterested in adapting to the new musical landscape have fled the city. But it wasn't just a pushing-out by economic forces — those DJs were lured by the vibes of other happening scenes.
"It seems like everyone [of the DJs] I know has moved to Berlin," Jimmy B said. "That's like a mecca for techno."
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