I meet Aja Archuleta, AKA Piano Rain, at La Taza on 21st and Mission, a small diner opened by Nicaraguan immigrants in 1997. She's come in from Oakland, where she's lived since 2001. The music she makes as Piano Rain runs the gamut from healing ambient to pleasingly lopsided rave sides. Archuleta was on the Ghost Ship bill and was working the door when the fire broke out."Oakland is a melting pot of people from so many different backgrounds trying to create a new utopia out of crumbling capitalism and the housing crisis," says Archuleta, bright-eyed and beatific. Across the street, a bulldozer operates in one of the street's few vacant lots. "At so many shows in Oakland," she says, "no one is turned away for lack of funds... It's not just, 'I work and make music and perform in clubs.' We live and breathe it and create a family around it."When the Oakland-based experimental club collective Club Chai did a photo shoot for, they texted artists, friends and anyone tangentially involved with their crew to come get in the shot. Russell E.L. Butler describes Club Chai's sound. "They've been able to create, within two years in existence, what I think is the best dance party in the Bay Area," they say, "because, it's everything. You'll go there, you'll hear everything, you'll see literally anyone and they will have anyone DJ. They'll have my weird house-crossover-techno-EBM ass play along with a kuduro DJ, or Esra [Canoğullari, AKA Club Chai co-founder 8ULENTINA] plays a lot of Turkish EDM. They're more concerned about your vision as an artist... and how you bring that to your community."Even within the experimental club world, where collectives like Janus, #KUNQ and Fade To Mind attempt to disrupt the lack of diversity, genre orthodoxy and comparative stuffiness of more traditional dance music scenes, Club Chai seems extraordinarily unconcerned with its members conforming to rigid aesthetic codes. I meet cofounders Canoğullari and Lara Sarkissian (FOOZOOL) backstage in the green room of The Midway, a gleaming, massive new club in The Dogpatch. They're co-promoting a show headlined by Gaika. Neither of them have been to the club before.Canoğullari speaks on the roots of Club Chai's radical inclusivity. "A lot of the house shows that were happening, someone would be DJing and then a band would play and then there would be a really amazing live techno set... then some weird noise set, it's just in the nature of The Bay to have so many genres... so I think we definitely try to have that approach in what we book but also the people who come to our parties." They add, "If the same type of person who wants to go to a Public Works party wants to come to Club Chai they're totally welcome as long as they're not an asshole."FOOZOOL and 8ULENTINA are dedicated to creating a safe space for trans people of color and people of diasporic backgrounds. Within the context of Oakland (and of Ghost Ship), the concept of "safe space" is freighted with a deeper meaning. There was a party the night after Ghost Ship. "They had a party planned and didn't want to cancel," Canoğullari recalls. "We had a Club Chai that month. We wanted to keep the space open for people to converge. That was such an intense night. I remember sobbing in the corner of the club."With spaces being shut down in the aftermath of Ghost Ship, Canoğullari says fellow promoters were more transparent and began sharing resources freely. Any sense of "gatekeeping" was eradicated, they note, if it ever existed to begin with.The year following Ghost Ship was also Club Chai's busiest ever. Sarkissian and Canoğullari toured Europe, hosted an ecstatic Boiler Room takeover in Oakland and kept up a monthly Radar Radio show. "I think there's so much power in DIY community and creating your own economy," Canoğullari says. "I felt so excited to create a situation where I can pay a friend or just financially support someone so that they can work creatively... sometimes there are really amazing moments where you can help each other survive on a day-to-day level."

Esra Canoğullari (8ULENTINA) and Lara Sarkissian (FOOZOOL)

DJ Primo, Jeremy Castillo, Vin Sol

The Detroit-born DJ Carlos Souffront moved to San Francisco five years ago to sell cheese for a cheesemaker in Petaluma. He's turned down residencies in town even as his reputation for uncompromising, Midwest-style DJing has earned him bookings across the world. Souffront is a beast behind the decks, but comes off more like a teddy bear everywhere else. He's still feeling a little thin from the Honey Soundsystem ten-year anniversary when he picks me up outside RS94109, the dance music record store/coffee shop/Dark Entries label HQ on Larkin St. in the impossible-to-gentrify Tenderloin. A couple months prior, Bubbles, the San Francisco DJ and queer activist, was murdered outside the store after an altercation in a nearby bar—another senseless tragedy.Souffront, meanwhile, is infectiously positive. He showed up at the Honey party for Jacob Sperber's first record at 6 PM on Saturday and stayed through to the final track at the afterparty, held at historic SoMa gay bar The Stud, around noon the next day. "I'm a fan, I'm a supporter," he says. "I love to get to HNY first thing because I like to see all their ideas before they get trashed." He tells me about a poster Sperber hung in the Public Works bathrooms bearing gravestones of all the now-closed clubs where the party had happened over the years. The tagline? "Honey Soundystem is a killer party."We drive from the gritty Tenderloin to verdant Hayes Valley, where well-heeled yuppies are out for a weekend stroll among buzzy cafes. We settle into a quaint bakery, and Souffront reveals his preconceptions about his adopted home. "The musical sensibility, to me, seemed flabby," he says. "I attributed that to the fact that it was always nice here. My impression was acid, breakbeats, kind of corny. But after I arrived, Solar and Brian Hock (C.L.A.W.S.) invited me to play a party that turned out to be one of the first underground parties that anyone had been to in a long time. It was awesome. I wasn't softening up my sound at all, I played pretty aggro and wild and people loved it."Over the past five years, Souffront says, "I found a new home, with heads as deep as in Detroit and Ann Arbor. Friendships that will last a lifetime." He also notes that, due to his work-from-home day job and regular trips out of town to DJ, he "feels insulated from the uglier aspects of the city." Indeed, his rosy assessment of the city's scene stands in sharp contrast to others I've heard. Perhaps hailing from Detroit, a city with the opposite problem—a surplus of space and a deficit of capital—helps him look on the bright side. "I feel there's a renaissance, certainly of gay dance culture, but dance culture overall."Souffront is a regular at The Stud, where the Honey afterparty stretched to midday. Founded in 1966, the bar's regulars have included RuPaul and Sylvester over the years. Its new ownership structure hearkens back to San Francisco's radical past. When the space was threatened by looming condos and the attendant rent hikes, a group of 18 friends of The Stud purchased the bar, making it the first worker-owned cooperative nightclub in the US. If you wander into The Stud on any given night, the drinks are cheap, the bartender might be wearing one of Dark Entries' ubiquitous Patrick Cowley shirts, and a local DJ will probably be playing techno to a tiny, but in many ways perfect, dance floor."The Stud is where it's happening right now," Souffront says. "The Wednesday night, Kosmetik, that's the shit... It's important that people support The Stud right now... so far, so good. People have really come together and made them a priority for both throwing events and showing up. It feels really healthy, it's going to be a nice place for young promoters to experiment."Sperber's gravestones for San Francisco clubs of yore point to what he found when he arrived in the city as a closeted gay kid: a town that loved to party. Hole-in-the-wall clubs with decent soundsystems and well-situated dance floors still dot the city, leaving fledgling promoters excellent options like F8, The Eagle, Underground SF and Amnesia, if not a guaranteed audience.Nearly everyone who has regularly gone out in San Francisco over the last ten years knows Primo Pitino. Tall and charismatic, he's been spinning records in The Mission nearly every week for the last 14 years. Whether it's a soul night at the Knockout, his long-running 2 Men Will Move You at Amnesia, goth nights, '80s nights, drag shows—he lives for records, for DJing, for making graffiti-style flyers with his trademark anthropomorphic cats. A few years ago, he co-founded what might be the defining party of his career, Club Lonely."I find him fascinating," Souffront says. "The way Primo can sell me a song that if I took it on my own it'd be like, 'This is tacky, it's not my style at all,' and through the sheer exuberance with which he delivers it, it's irresistible, it's so charming... those parties are lit!"I meet the Club Lonely boys at the Lone Palm on 21st, an unassuming watering hole with a neon palm tree in the window. Primo's joined by Vin Sol, who has been DJing parties in San Francisco since 2001 while releasing excellent jack tracks on labels like Clone, Honey Soundsystem, Unknown To The Unknown, Ultramajic and HNYTRX. The young Padawan of the Club Lonely team is Jeremy Castillo, a lifelong San Francisco resident who grew up in The Mission, just a few blocks away."Vin and I had been playing house music for a while, just in his room," Primo says. "Hanging out listening to a tribal house record thinking, 'How great would it be if you could play this on a soundsystem, for the public?' My friends would tell me about Club OMG, these kids liked going there because nobody went." Primo stopped in one night with a couple friends. "We literally doubled the crowd and it was Saturday night... there were some older drag scenes there, but it seemed like the kind of place that would be much more at home in the Castro than on Sixth Street... we went in there and it was all lapis lazuli blue inside, there were projections on the dome." Think of an unabashedly garish gay bar that blasts Madonna remixes to a dwindling dance floor, and you're close. "I walked into the bathroom and I came back and looked at the bartender and I said, 'I want to throw a party here!'"Primo's idea, hatched late at night in a dead circuit bar while under the influence, was not a clear winner. OMG, located in SoMA on the edge of the Financial District, was in a no man's land where Vin or Primo's friends rarely ventured. "After the drugs wore off and Vin and I were in the clear light of day, I asked Vin, 'Are we really trying to go all the way down to Sixth and Market? Man, we could really be sad.' And we were talking about what to name it and Vin smacked the table and said, 'CLUB LONELY.' I was like, 'Oh my god, because if no one shows up, truth in advertising motherfucker!'"They showed up. Castillo, whom Sol took under his wing when he was working at a tattoo shop, was tied-in with a younger scene of art school, streetwear and hip-hop heads who turned out in force. Matrixxman, until he left the city, was billed as a "resident," his job being to man the fog machine. The trio played everything, from tribal house records to Patrick Adams productions. All manner of obscure '90s dance 12-inches worked."It's so surprising to see all these different types of people," Primo says. "There are hip-hop streetwear kids hugging drag queens. A lot of young drag babies have asked us if they can dance go-go for us... old people show up and dance sometimes, old school drag queens will be there... it definitely came out of the desire to have this music exist in a place that's free and wild, especially on the San Francisco side of things. There's this weird pressure and all the subcultures start to take a hit, and now we all have to hang out with each other."The club's Lil' Louis-referencing name, originally conceived for the very real possibility that Castillo, Primo and Vin would be DJing only for each other, now takes on a larger significance. "I think that's one of the reasons that people respond to Club Lonely," Primo says, "is because it's a lonely experience being a weird person in San Francisco, to be an artist, to be a young, strange soul." We chop it up for a while longer, talking music, the associated Club Lonely label, about occasional party guests like PLO Man, LNS and Bill Converse. Naturally, we gravitate back to slugging it out as an artist in the most expensive city in America."I don't think it's us vs. them anymore," Primo says. "It's just us trying to live. It's such a one-sided battle.""I think that's why all the artists and freaks get together and hang out," Vin adds."I was outside The Stud and some woman was talking about hyperlocal economic climates because [cloud computing company] Salesforce was in town," Primo says. "I'm in here listening to The Creatrix play a bunch of terrorizing ass techno and this girl was on the dance floor and she comes out and she sounds like a fucking computer. It's fucking depressing."Miroslav Wiesner, founder of Surefire Agency, a San Francisco outfit that handles booking for the likes of Kode9, Call Super and Vatican Shadow, as well as Russell Butler and Club Chai, takes exception to this sort of talk. "Greed does attract a low common denominator of human," he says, "but to suggest that the entire population somehow fits into this vanilla category got really aggravating... let's just take techno as an example. Five or six years ago there were three recognizable techno brands and now there are like seven." He's onto something. Zaldua's Surface Tension has relied, in part, on an influx of curious techies to bring in bleeding-edge acts like Lucy, Powell and Silent Servant.One 2014 warehouse party in Oakland was a Damascus moment for Wiesner. "We walked in, Objekt was headlining, and they sold 750 tickets to this thing," Wiesner says. "That was when the light bulb went off. Google's not stupid, they're hiring you mid-20s-to-early-30s single, young, affluent, intelligent people from all over the world and they're bored and they have disposable income."We're speaking in the empty, hulking main room back at The Midway, which is usually dark on weekends as only a few DJs—your Nina Kraviz's and your Dixon's—can fill it. "A friend of mine who manages a team at Google said his team was so bored and had so much money they would, like, fly to Southeast Asia to go skiing for a weekend because they couldn't find something intriguing to do at the civic level."He hopes MUTEK's mix of art, technology and music, will activate the young, moneyed tech community. Weisner's led a successful bid to launch MUTEK SF, the first US MUTEK, in May of 2018. "The MU in MUTEK stands for mutation... and if you think about a mutating civic landscape from the Port City to the Barbary Coast to the fucking psychedelia, you name it, things transition here so quickly compared to other cities."The Creatrix, real name Sylvia Viviana, was born in San Francisco, raised in Bolivia and came into her own as an artist in the Oakland scene. "I don't know if I would be making music if I didn't live in Oakland," she says. "There were a lot of people of color who were interested in sharing their skills and sharing their art with each other."Viviana appeared onand released a cassette through New York's No-Tech imprint. Two years ago, she moved back to San Francisco, leaving behind a community of activists, healers and music makers. "This was what I was avoiding confronting," she says. "That the place I'm from has changed so much and is so unrecognizable and unwelcoming to someone like me."It's where Viviana discovered her identity. "I think it's a lot easier being an open, queer person here," they say. I seem to see Viviana everywhere over the week I'm in San Francisco—at the sound bath, at Club Chai's gig at the Midway. I get the sense she goes out a lot.Naturally, she was at Honey's landmark anniversary. "I was having a lot of reflective moments on what it was like going to Honey parties eight or nine years ago," she says. "Everyone seemed to know each other... they're the weird gay people, the ones that listen to the weird gay music. I go to Honey parties now and it's still the same feeling, it hasn't changed that much. I ended up going to Amnesia afterwards. Primo was DJing and I was thinking about Primo... Everything that he's involved with has that same feeling, slow jams night, oldies night, 2menwillmoveyou... you go in there and feel like you're entering this bubble. I really love that. Primo and Topazu were DJing at Amnesia. Everyone was at the HNY night, so it was an empty night. It was two of us on the dance floor going insane because they were playing really hard, scalding techno. I was having a moment, because I feel so lucky to call these people my friends and comrades. We've sacrificed so much to give other people space, whether they come or not."A few days later, back at his studio, Sperber tells me about a unique Bay Area phenomenon. "One of the most hilarious things that I've seen that is so indicative is BART," Sperber says. "Now, at peak times, people line up where they think the door of the next car will open up. Door for door for door, there are 20 people in a single-file line all the way down... there's not a poster or a PSA or an NPR advertisement that says, 'Hey, can you please wait in line so you can get on the train?'" Even with the queues, riders wait two or three trains for their ride home. "This city is so blown up right now that people are having to create their own systems of change because the city itself isn't and can't maintain it."Back at the Oakland Museum, Russell is talking about the efforts of the Oakland Warehouse Coalition and DIY Safer Spaces to help tenants take control of their spaces, to get them up to code for their own safety and also to avoid eviction. "Before it didn't really feel like there was anything fighting against this tide," Butler says. "You had to sit down and accept it for a bit. And then after the election, so many people felt exhausted and beaten down and were like, 'Well, if this is the worst thing that can happen what happens if I actually try to do some shit?'"If Trump was the worst case scenario for the radical progressivism that originally shaped The Bay, creative destruction is the worst threat to its economic diversity. Policies springing up in the wake of Ghost Ship, without opposition, could stamp out the underground and drive out marginal artists, the intellectual lifeblood of the region."Look at NYC Dance with the Cabaret Law," Butler says. "A 91-year-old law gets struck down less than a year since the election... if they can do that there, and it feels like people aren't really steering the ship over here, then let's take control of some shit. Let's make the mistakes in order to make a brighter future for everybody, what's the other fucking option?"On my final day in San Francisco, I interview a few people over tea on Valencia in The Mission. Afterwards, I take a circuitous walk up the hill, past the painted ladies and back down into the Lower Haight, passing a line of kids patiently waiting outside a boba shop. I stop into Vinyl Dreams, which feels more like a living room than a place of business. Tasho Nicolopulos stops through the store and we head for a beer.I've been asking everyone I speak with why they stay in San Francisco or Oakland, given their unaffordability and creeping cultural decline. But after a week walking its neighborhoods and crisscrossing the Bay on BART, the city's charms are obvious, along with its flaws.When I ask Tasho that question, he gives a couple of breezy answers ("It's home, I'd have to start a new life"), then pauses. He swallows. "Alright, so, I'm hesitant to throw this as the final thing I say but it just came to my mind. Last conversation I had with Johnny Igaz (Nackt) was right on the corner of Haight and Fillmore. I was coming from Underground SF, he was headed there. I was going home early that night and we stopped and had what was probably a 20-minute conversation. One of things that came up was moving out of the Bay Area and how I want to do that. You know, personal things, breakups, make you think about leaving and he had similar things. I just remember him saying, 'We have to stay, who else is gonna do it?'"

To dig deeper into the sounds of Oakland and San Francisco, check out our playlist of music from Bay Area producers.