Also this issue:

Founding Fathers
The experts at Philly's new Foundry label want to make good music and good money at the same time.
-A.D. Amorosi

Bringing It All Back Home
Bob Dylan returns to Newport.
-Nate Chinen

Tomas Jirku
-Sean O’Neal

The Catheters
-Paul Burress

Stephen Wade
-Mary Armstrong

August 15-21, 2002

music

Mixed Messages

Electronic music pioneer Mark Farina puts it all together.

by Sean O’Neal

For turntable maestro Mark Farina, good music has nothing to do with a specific genre. Whether it be hip-hop sub-grooves, Latin, or straight-up deep soulful house, there is a certain common thread to all of his mixes. It’s all tastefully funky. Farina was known for dropping unforgettable extended house sets (often for as long as eight hours) in Chicago before he relocated to San Francisco. Since house dominated the electronic music scene in the Windy City, Farina used to make frequent trips to New York’s music conferences for something fresh.

“At clubs up there, there would be two rooms of music,” Farina remembers. “There was always the B-room that would play something different. In Chicago, the B-room would always play the same music as the A-room, except not on as good of a sound system. I started playing in this other room at Shelter in Chicago. I started getting into other non-housey stuff.… There really was no dance floor in there -- sort of like a head-nod kind of room. Also at that time, De La Soul, Soul II Soul, Galliano and all the early Talkin Loud stuff was all coming out. I started playing stuff like that mixed with some classics. Then coming to San Francisco, there was more of a scene for that music here.”

Over the years, the veteran DJ has dished out a yummy catalog of mix CDs like San Francisco Sessions, Seasons One and the Imperial Dub series. His latest mix, Connect (Om Records), is a jazzy, bumpin’, heart-warming joy ride that unifies the dance floor grooviness of Chicago house with the atmospheric gravity of San Francisco. But you never know what you’re going to get with Farina in a live setting.

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“Mix CDs are a little less spontaneous because you need permission to use stuff,” he contends. “You have to try to license things, but you also want to hopefully sound spur-of-the-moment and not too contrived. Generally, when I play live I don’t have any sets planned -- it’s just wherever I am, geographically, what club, how many times I played there, what new records I have and who plays before me -- all kind of depends on where I am going next.”

Mark Farina plays Fri., Aug. 16, 9:30 p.m.-2 a.m., $15, with Willyum, Carl Michaels, Brendan and Joey Blanco, 1616 Club, 1616 Locust St., 215-413-7143.