Music

IN THE COLLECTIVE history of the Bay Area, the mid-1990s produced more than just a rash of dot-com launch parties and delightfully irrational exuberance. It was also the era when San Francisco emerged as the new center of the DJ world, following Chicago in the 1980s and New York in the '70s. And as this was happening, twentysomething half-Filipino American promoter Mark Herlihy began to throw his first parties under the curious name Future Primitive Sound Sessions.

The sessions began as DJ-oriented parties, held at the now-defunct Big Heart City. "At the time in San Francisco, everybody was jocking European trip-hop DJs," Herlihy recalls. "Meanwhile cats like Q-Bert and them were playing for $100 at somebody's debut. I had a chip on my shoulder about getting great American hip-hop DJs into that scene." The earliest sessions welcomed both local turntablists like the Space Travelers and popular down-tempo DJs such as Spooky.

As the trip-hop fad faded, Herlihy turned his attention to an emerging generation of party DJs with brilliant compositional and scratch skills, who still knew how to rock a crowd. In 1997 he brought together Cut Chemist and Shortkut for a session that would prove to be a watershed event. The idea of having two DJs improvise off one another wasn't new, but Future Primitive Sound showed uncanny insight, with pairings that produced spectacular results. At one 7-inch-only night, Cut Chemist and DJ Shadow premiered a set that became their vaunted mix CD Brainfreeze (Sixty 7).

Herlihy formed a crucial partnership of his own with legendary graffiti artist Doze. At a 1998 session with Z-Trip and Radar, Herlihy convinced Doze to paint a piece during the show, right next to the stage. "There was a parallel between the fluidity of this man's painting style and the fluidity of the mix," Herlihy remembers. "It's all about getting funk in your letters." Doze became a fixture at Future Primitive Sound's events, painting original works on canvas as the DJs splashed their own creations off vinyl.

It's no wonder Future Primitive Sound (which includes operations manager Janice Myint) has grown far beyond just sponsoring hip-hop/DJ parties and has evolved into a full-fledged institution of artistic innovation. Walk into the Future Primitive Sound Headquarters at the corner of Haight and Steiner Streets and you'll find a record label, art gallery, and store merged into one. DJ culture still figures at the center, but Herlihy and his staff have also spun into a larger world of visual and musical creativity. "We're living in a multimedia world right now, and hip-hop was one of the first musical subcultures that really embraced dancing, painting, writing, beats. I want to add more to those foundations," Herlihy says.

Since 1999, Future Primitive Sound has released a select series of albums, singles, and now mix tapes, lead by personalities as diverse as Mr. Dibbs, DJ Zeph, J. Boogie, and most recently, Romanowski. All these releases share a focus on movement, the fluidity Herlihy so treasures, yet distill it further, and his philosophy goes right to the concept behind that curious name. Herlihy explains, "To have the vision to create new trends in music, you need to understand what's happened before. Outside that, you're just repeating things. Future Primitive is a reference to what I think is important about DJing or just knowing your music: understand your roots and from there, move forward." (Oliver Wang)