Still, it was drum & bass that kept people coming, even if – as time went by – the genre began to lose steam. The sound, and the party, had become increasingly mired in dark, techstep sounds, and by the time 2002 rolled around, many San Francisco clubbers – especially the rocker types that had drifted into Eklektic’s orbit – started moving towards newer, more fashionable scenes. “It was more of a dirty rock ‘n’ roll moment,” says Host. “Drum & bass wasn’t the cool thing anymore.” In May of 2002, the party moved again; back to Thursday nights at the single-room Caliente.

By now, Alemagna was burnt out. She wasn’t happy with Caliente and after years of throwing a weekly party – during which time she had done plenty of partying in her own right – she knew that it was time. “I woke up one morning and decided, ‘Thursday was going to be the last Eklektic.’ That was on a Tuesday morning. I made this decision without asking anyone because it was my decision to make. We just did the last one and that was it. A lot of people were disappointed. A lot of people were out of a job, but my instincts were telling me, ‘You don’t want this party to not be cool anymore, so let’s just stop it while it’s hot and let it live as a legend.’ I didn’t want to see it fizzle, because I was getting a sense that that could be coming. I didn’t make a big deal of it. I just sent an apology – a thank you – to everybody.”

In the months and years that followed, Eklektic and Groundscore threw a handful of one-off events, including an 8-year anniversary with Roni Size in 2005 and a 10-year anniversary reunion in 2007. The weekly party, however, never returned, and Eklektic’s founders largely went their separate ways. (Granted, that process had begun even before the weekly’s demise, as Alemagna’s strong grip on the party, not to mention everyone’s natural sense of creative wanderlust, had prompted the rest of the crew to follow their own paths and try new things.)

Post-Eklektic, Griffin continued DJing, but she left San Francisco in 2003 to start her own music licensing company in Los Angeles; she’s since relocated to Seattle and continues working in the tech industry. Totten kept up her hectic touring schedule for a while, but persistent health issues forced her to give up life on the road in 2004. After a number of moves, she’s back in Belfast, though she recently announced a North American tour for this fall. (It’ll be her first extended run of DJ gigs in quite some time, playing drum & bass.) Host also left town, relocating to New York in 2004 and continuing her career as a music journalist. For a time, she was DJing electro and booty bass as one half of Syrup Girls, alongside fellow Eklektic alum Siren, but she then went on to co-found the Trouble & Bass label and crew, which recently wrapped up an influential run of its own.

As for Alemagna, she continued working in nightlife and ran Groundscore for a few years, but moved to the East Coast in 2005. She and Felix divorced (although the two remain friends), and she wound up in Philadelphia, where she now works in the restaurant industry. As it happens, it was Langan who stuck around San Francisco the longest; after DJing regularly for several years and launching her own party and radio show called Moxie in 2004, she too left the city in 2009 and eventually settled in Berlin.

These days, the Eklektic crew may be scattered around the globe, but everyone involved looks back on the party fondly. “Eklektic had this vibrancy and this light to it,” says Griffin, “even though we were playing the darkest shit you could find.” “It wasn’t a sterile environment,” remembers Alemagna. “We really made it beautiful and sexy, and I think that resonated really well with people. We took good care of our crowd and we took care of the venues. We took good care of the artists. People never felt ripped off. They didn’t mind paying to come to our party.”

“Eklektic made me really proud of being from San Francisco,” says Host. “I would tour around and everyone would know what it was. We were doing drum & bass for real, with legit tunes; the freshest tunes, really good DJing – but having a lot of fun with it, also.” And, of course, they all value the experience of working with so many amazing women. “The women that ran it, the amount of women that were involved was very unique,” observes Totten. “It still is, unfortunately.”