By Amanda Nowinski

TURN IT UP , but keep quiet about it. A group of anonymous dance music DJs are here to inject the S.F. scene with a desperately needed dose of renegade flavor – on FM radio, pirate style. The tech-savvy team recently launched Pressure FM – seven years in the making – on 88.1, where it pumps out top-notch styles of house, U.K. garage (2-step), and broken beat every Friday from 6 p.m. to midnight. We can't disclose the details of the operation, but like a map point for an old-school underground, the actual location will provide you with everything you need to know: that quality dance music is at the people's disposal.

The DJs behind Pressure FM take inspiration from the proliferation of pirate stations in the U.K., which have been consistently responsible for exposing their listeners to some of dance music's best – in other words, the stuff you won't hear on a market-driven station. Perhaps this concept is not so revolutionary in the U.K., where unused space on the airwaves is more plentiful, but any pirate station that succeeds in the States is no less than extraordinary, mostly because the Federal Communications Commission-regulated radio industry has gradually turned the airwaves into a big-money infomercial for the major labels.

Soon the Pressure FM team plans to go 24-7 and will expand its repertoire to include a more diverse range of dance genres. Drop in and tune in – this is the beginning of something groundbreaking for the S.F. scene. Here's what two Pressure FM DJs had to say.

Bay Guardian: Was your decision to start a pirate radio at all politically motivated? It's a precarious time to challenge the government.

Marauder: [Pressure FM] is clandestine, so it's politically charged. And if someone came to us and made it a political issue, then we'd have to deal with it. But I don't want that. I'm glad that we've opened the door for other people to do that, but I'm just glad to get the music out. We've put so much energy into it, we just want it to grow.

Emanon: For us this is really about the next step for the S.F. dance community. It's the next logical step. It's been 20 years; it's not going away anytime soon. I DJ, I go out and talk to people, and talking to people in the industry, it's not ready to die out.

BG: Most American dance music listeners have probably given up on radio. I don't even have an antenna on my stereo, and I can't afford DSL for Internet radio.

E: You can't have a fucking computer in your car.

BG: Dance music is not readily available to the people in America. You have to aggressively seek it out to arrive at even the very tip of the iceberg.

M: It's for a snoot set. Rather than being something that's just served up, there are all these prerequisites: you need to know this genre and that genre and what's cool. The reason we all got into the scene in the first place was the complete opposite of all that.

BG: Because it was just messy and fun.

M: What we're doing now is trying to help blow that out. To stop the genrefication and start something that is what it is: just music. Hopefully people can connect to it, and then we can start up some feedback mechanism so that people can give us feedback. That's hard for us right now: to remain safe but to also open up lines of communication.

E: We want people to be a part of this, and that's a big problem for us. We want everyone to be involved, and it's really important to us that it happens.

BG: But with FCC penalties that can put you 75K in the hole, you can't really trust anyone with this secret.

E: I'm not saying that we want people to come down and hang out during broadcast, but we want people to be a part of this by listening, giving us feedback, and by getting the word out. What's the difference between us and KUSF? Our goal is to be on all the time. [KUSF DJ] Andrew Jervis has a couple hours a week, but we want to be on all the time. And you don't have to sit at your computer and listen to something that sounds like shit, anyway.

M: And maybe the people who were around in '90 and '91 don't go out anymore and don't feel connected. I know I don't feel the same connection when I go out anymore. Lucky for me, I got to experience things from what I consider the heyday: '90 to '95. It took up our lives. I don't feel the same connection, although I'm not jaded.

E: But this way you can keep up with the music.

M: [Dance music genres] are so split up that you need to first decide on the music you want to hear, and then you have to go out somewhere specific. I like the idea that there's a mash-up going on [on Pressure FM]. That's what I liked about the earlier days: no one cared about what kind of record you dropped, just as long as it kept things going. I don't know that that happens in too many places anymore.

BG: I would love to be able to hear good dance music on the radio 24-7. Dance music has had such a minimal presence on U.S. radio that it's nearly impossible to imagine.

M: I can't tell you the excitement I get from this. As far as technology goes, that you can Web stream something from here to Egypt and back is astounding; it's crazier than going to the moon. But knowing all that stuff, I can't tell you how exciting it was to be in my car hearing this amazing 2-step. It was flying through the air, and there is something special about that. There's something to that free exchange that is thrilling.

BG: Isn't it odd that this has never happened in San Francisco?

M: That's what we're always talking about. Some of the richest vibes that happened in the dance community happened here in the early '90s. People were writing about it like it was the rebirth of the summer of love. And in the midst of all that, with the Internet stuff happening here, there were so many people focusing on broadcasting music on the Internet.

E: No one thought to do [a pirate station] because of the Internet.

M: Initially it was a frustration. We found out that people didn't have radios, they were so Silicon Valley Internet style.

BG: Internet radio is great, but it's still relatively economically elitist.

E: But at the same time dance music has proliferated so much because of the relative ease of Internet radio. Even if you only have a hundred dollars coming in a month, you can stream music all over the world. But this [FM radio] shit is extremely expensive to set up.

BG: But you have the capability to attract housewives and teenagers who might be really turned on. There are trance and progressive house hours on some commercial stations, but that shit is so bad that I think it does more harm than good. It's like telling people that Sisqó is hip-hop.