A self-driving car killed a beloved SF cat. It’s part of a long history of tech companies using the Bay as a testing ground at our expense. People have had enough.
Since the so-called “discoverer” of the San Francisco Bay, Captain Gaspar de Portola, a wealthy Spanish explorer, landed in the Bay Area, extractive forces have followed. From gold rushers to Silicon Valley dot com billionaires, capitalists covet the Bay Area for its resources, natural beauty, and unexplainable cultural energy.
Bay Area music is not immune to that vampiric desire of the capitalist class. Music from the Bay is as dense and shifting as the waves under the Golden Gate but is not easily trapped by the crude machinations of the music industry. From Pharoah Sanders to CLUB CHAI, the sonic creations of the Bay care little for the soul crushing logic of the market. In short, as Howard Wiley once put it to me, “the Bay got that thang.”
On the weekend of September 20th, the music promotion company Goldenvoice — and its parent company AEG — threw their fourth annual Portola Music Festival at Pier 80 in San Francisco. Named after the 1909 Portola Festival, a five-day event held to reinvigorate the spirit of San Francisco following the 1906 earthquake, Portola Music Festival books a wide range of acts within the umbrella of electronic music. Not even a handful of those acts are based in or from the Bay Area. It is important to mention that AEG’s industrialist owner Philip Anschutz funds far-right projects like the Heritage Foundation and, I kid you not, the gifts-that-totally-aren’t-bribes Clarence Thomas received. Anschutz’s investments range from Major League Soccer to oil drilling and a lot of far-right pet projects in between. Anschutz is cut from the same cloth as the Gaspar de Portola’s of the world, seeing the Bay as just another object to capture.
Yet there are crews, collectives, and artists in the Bay who actively resist this capture. NO BIAS is one of them.
RITCHRD looking at Portola Lineup Flyers September 20th 2025. Photo by Gabriel Lopez.
Label head RITCHRD (they/them) agreed to talk with me before the party as DJs sound checked and the bartenders stocked the mini Red Bull fridge. As I arrived at F8, so named as it rests on the corner of 8th Street and Folsom, they were on their way out the door on a quest to put up some flyers outside of one of the Portola After Parties at a nearby venue. I accompanied them on their mission putting up the two posters outside of the after party run by the DJ collective SQUISH at Monument. “They said it was ok,” RITCHRD mentions to me as we tape some flyers to a parking meter.
On our way back we spotted a large bill for the Portola festival plastered on a boarded up empty retail space. “How many artists are from the Bay on the lineup?” I ask. We counted 3.
“How many artists are from the Bay on the lineup?” I ask. We counted 3.
Before NO BIAS was a premiere dance music label it started as a party. “I was doing the art show thing at the end of 2019 and had been going to a lot of raves and I was like this is really sick why isn't this happening in venues,” RITCHRD tells me.
“I hit up Underground SF and I was like, okay, I wanna get these East Bay DJs to play at this bar and bring our sound over here, you know?”
“What is the East Bay sound?” I asked.“ Then? I don't know. It was crazy. I remember hearing a lot of like ballroom samples, but tons of Gabber and there were also the people who were influenced by CLUB CHAI, like global club sounds.”
"Super bassy too, there's that, like, Wook Burning Man influence,” they added.
RITCHRD threw three parties at Underground SF and then the COVID-19 Pandemic hit.
In August of 2020 amid moving back and forth between Los Angeles and Oakland, RITCHRD started volunteering at Oakland-based online radio station Lower Grand Radio. “I started my show and started the label all at the same time.”
The first three releases were all RITCHRD productions, “all me just doing house and garage [as in UK garage] influenced stuff.” The influences were important according to RITCHRD, “I really wanted it to be house music too. I love house. And I feel like house music is underground and rave-y even though people don't associate it with that.”
Since the fall of 2020, NO BIAS has dropped 65 releases ranging from house acolytes like Rental VHS to club maximalists like Bored Lord.
“A lot of the NO BIAS stuff had to do with me meeting people at Lower Grand.”
RITCHRD and VARSHA djing at a No BIAS party at F8 in early 2025. Photo by Gabriel Lopez.
“Do you think DJs are workers?” I ask Ritchrd as patrons start filtering into the club.
“We're all independent contractors, and we're all working at different venues. The structure is: venues have connections with promoters, promoters book the DJs. The promoters middle man the money and pocket a percentage. The venue's getting the most and the DJs definitely the most disenfranchised. So we are working, we’re trying to survive.”
Not all DJs are working in the same way however, as the problem of hobbyist DJs came up in our discussion.
“Someone who's a construction worker, they're not working alongside dudes who are just doing it for fun and doing it for free. But with DJing, it is that way.”
I then asked if these hobbyist DJs were messing up the money for the hustlers trying to make a living.
“ I'm not gonna like hate on them necessarily, but I am just gonna point out that there is this really weird thing going on that doesn't exist in a lot of other types of work that ends up lowering the amount of money or whatever power DJs have 'cause there's people who just don't care about that.”
As we got into the plight of the hobbyist DJ, DJs Yuca Frita, clad in a very cool Outkast ATLiens tee, and Bastiengoat, who kindly shared a pre-rave cigarette with me, joined our conversation.
In turn, I asked them if DJs were workers. They both immediately answered “yes.”
“I think the core of it is actually because artists aren't seen as workers and we have to reframe that. It also touches on the problem of people not identifying ourselves as workers,” said Yuca Frita.“I think the whole idea of people having to think of themselves as a business, as something to sell, the whole content creation thing further perpetuates this idea that we're all just like sole like entities trying to sell our product,” she added.
As more patrons started filtering into the club and Yuca Frita and Bastiengoat’s back to back set time approached I asked the trio what could be done to make the DJ “economy” in the Bay better. “Government grants,” answered RITCHRD.
“ We don't invest in the arts to begin with, like on a systemic level, so the funding's missing to make it accessible,” Yuca Frita added.
“ Something interesting could be a DJ Collective, 'cause I was reading about Design Collective and when they get a gig maybe one person works on it more than another one but the whole collective is getting paid out. What if a DJ Collective was like sure this person's playing the gig, but it's going into the pot and it's getting distributed according to people’s needs so everyone can pay their rent,” said RITCHRD.
With the party entering full swing and the bouncers side eyeing my Zoom recorder pointed at RITCHRD I asked them, “What’s the thing that keeps you doing this?”
RITCHRD beamed and answered, “ Honestly, knowing that I'm able to get my friends paid. Not that I like super care about money. I mean, everyone cares about money 'cause we need to survive. But I'm like, oh shit, I put this much money in people's pockets, you know, like thousands of dollars going into my community's pockets, that is one thing that keeps me going when I'm feeling tired of this.”
I left F8 around 1am that night. The club never really filled up the way I hoped, or at least not as much as other NO BIAS parties. I thought of the Portola Festival and its dozens of after parties with major acts playing venues all across town. I wondered what the night would be like if Portola had partnered with NO BIAS and made their party an after party. Maybe it would be a check nice enough to help someone make rent? It only took me a second to realize that it would never work. The soul of the underground, of dance music, of Black culture that those of us in the Bay are so lucky to experience can not blossom under the conditions of a corporate sponsorship.
Billionaires can throw music festivals named after conquistadors, and wealthy tech DJs can spin at $20 cocktail clubs, but they won’t ever hear the symphony of sounds made from Night Heron calls and subwoofers in Nissan Altimas. They won’t ever truly listen to the Bay.
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Gabriel Lopez is the host of Vinelands on KEXP, Garment on Lower Grand Radio, and works in labor. He is usually wrangling his dog and extending deadlines.
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