inthemix | Features | Mark Farina: Master of the Mushroom Jazz

Chicago’s own Mark Farina is one of the world’s most well known and loved DJs. For over 20 years he has championed a brand of ‘boompty boompty’ Chicago house alongside fellow Chi-town natives Derrick Carter and Johnny Fiasco, in doing so making a worldwide name for himself as a ‘modern day traveling minstrel’.

His career is full of highlights. There’s been singles and EPs like Dream Machine and Air Farina, compilations like San Franciso Sessions, House Of OM, last year’s Live In Tokyo release and his Fabric compilation release earlier this year. Arguably though, nothing has more defined Farina than his acclaimed Mushroom Jazz series. What started in 1992 as a short run of mixtapes featuring obscure, jazz-infused, downtempo and smoked-out beats has evolved into its own genre, a slick, smooth and always quality snapshot of Farina’s current musicals moods and flavours that’s released with pleasure by San Francisco’s OM Records.

Mushroom Jazz Volume 6 has just dropped and, unsurprisingly, it’s fantastic. As Farina explains from his home in San Francisco, the series still contains similar left-of-centre tunes; it’s been his sourcing of those tunes that has changed throughout the course of the series.

“A lot of the themes are still the same,” he says. “I still try and find dubby, jazzy, underground, hip-hoppy kind of stuff. [But] maybe things that have changed a bit since the earlier one is [that] now I actually know a lot of the people who make those kind of tunes. The first couple of volumes I didn’t know as many artists and I was more of a punter, buying records and picking random things, whereas now I can ask people for tunes beforehand. Especially since I’ve been with OM for so long and they have a lot of good artists that I just happen to like as well.”

Indeed, Farina’s relationship with OM only gets stronger with each passing year, helped in part no doubt by the label’s evolution into nurturing hip hop, downtempo and soul acts like J-Boogie’s Dubtronic Science, Strange Fruit Project and King Kooba.

“We have a good relationship,” Farina freely admits. “It’s been hard for a lot of labels with this whole digital transfer age and a lot have gone by the wayside so OM still maintains it’s own integrity and a bit of style, which is a great thing. They’re not known for just house or one thing. They’re know for different styles which brings in different listeners and new people.”

As a label that was originally aligned with the West Coast brand of soulful, deep house synonymous with the likes of Miguel Migs, Kaskade and Jay-J, the OM stable may not initially appear to be the ideal fit for such a Chicago House purist as Farina and fellow labelmate Johnny Fiasco. However, Farina assures us its musical output is very much in keeping with his own view of what house is about.

“Some sub-genres might be played longer than others but it all resorts back to [Chicago] house for me,” he says. “I still think I’m fortunate to be brought up in the Chicago house world which I think encompasses a lot of sub-genres that exist these days.”

“Chicago house can be a lot of different things, from minimal to techno to electro to deep house, to jackin’. It’s still Chicago house to me even though it’s all different. That music and that tempo hasn’t gone away; they just call it different things over the course of time.”

Looking forward to returning to Australia this weekend for a three stop tour taking in Canberra, Melbourne and Sydney, Farina retains props for Australian producers including DJ Freestyle, Illya and Ricardo Rae but believes the current digital age is making music too disposable, with many good tracks being lost in cyberspace as opposed to being picked up via traditional media like vinyl and CDs.

“I think it’s pretty easy [for some music] to fall through the cracks,” he says. “There’s so many different ways to get tunes. To me it loses the personality a bit. At least you know when you have a CD or a cassette or a record and you put it in that stack, and leave it there, it’s going to stay there whereas when a song or track is in cyberspace, it loses a little of its glamour.”

“I come from a background of being excited when you open up the record sleeve and get the full LP and read the inside and notes and pull out all the jackets. Now it’s just like a title in your computer; there might or might not be artwork. There’s always that fear of if it crashes you could lose a whole heap of stuff.”

Mark Farina’s Mushroom Jazz Volume 6 is out now through OM/Stomp, catch him this weekend as he touches down for a whirlwind three-date tour…

Sat Nov 1: Oxford Art Factory, Sydney
Mon Nov 3: Seven, Melbourne
Tue Nov 4: Thoroughbred Park Raceway, Canberra