“When I turned 21,” Benji recalls, “and could finally go to all the parties in SF in 2012, I would go to the city like 5 or 6 nights a week.” Every night there were weekly parties like Ritual Thursdays, a dubstep night, or Beat Church, a glitch-oriented evening that helped Heyoka get his start. On the weekends, huge four-room bass music parties raged at 1015 Folsom. It was this year that partners Morgan McCloud and Gleb Tchertkov founded Wormhole and began hosting Wormhole Wednesdays. The weekly bounced between different venues before settling into an Oakland club called Era. Benji, who had production chops and a modest roledex of agents and artists from his time in Santa Cruz, soon joined Wormhole full time.

Meanwhile, currents began to churn that would change the cultural and economic topography of the Bay and impact the underground bass music scene as a result. The Bay Area recovered more rapidly than most regions after the severe economic downturn of 2008. By 2015, eight of California 12 counties with unemployment rates below the national average were in the nine-county Bay Area region, according to the San Francisco Chronicle. Credit went to the rising tech sector, which engendered a thriving white collar economy.

San Francisco is already a small city, with a population under 900,000 a land mass of 46 square miles (New York City is over 300 square miles by comparison). Housing always had a degree of desirability and exclusivity, then the tech boom brought on an unprecedented influx of affluence. By 2015, as the producer of documentary San Francisco 2.0 Alexandra Pelosi put it in The Daily Beast, “not a week goes by without a headline about the growing pains brought on by the tech Gold Rush in San Francisco.” The struggle over “who gets to live in The City” escalated.

Soaring rents dramatically impacted poor and working class neighborhoods in San Francisco and Oakland, as indeed they did across America. In the Bay, though, the neighborhoods were generally filled with a higher percentage of artists and musicians. Warehouses that skirted the line between work spaces, living quarters, and venues - “empty” from a municipal and tax standpoint - were low hanging fruit for developers. “Otherworld was a huge staple for underground parties in the Bay for about 15 years,” notes Benji. This warehouse, where Wormhole hosted one of its larger un-permitted parties, was razed by developers in 2016 and replaced by luxury condominiums.

The East Bay fared better than San Francisco, though, and Wormhole Wednesday tapped into this dynamic when they began to push their weekly party. “We never really thought we’d get anywhere near as many people out as we did for a venue bass music party in Oakland, let alone on a Wednesday,” Benji says. “We pretty quickly discovered just how many people moved out of San Francisco and into the East Bay because it’s [SF] so unaffordable.”

Technology was not the only fluctuating economy that impacted the underground electronic scene. “When I was a teenager going to festivals,” Andrei recalls with a chuckle, “pretty much every person at the festival was involved in the weed business in one way or another. People would come from all over the world to go to Burning Man and then go to the hills in California and trim for a couple months.” Cannabis workers and their non-traditional hours filled electronic dance floors in the Bay and helped sustain weekly bass music parties. As the black market for marijuana has shrunk over the last decade, there’s less money in California cannabis. Some of that money - and some of the bass music, for that matter - has moved to Denver.