Om Records’ 30 Years of Deep House, Downtempo and Hip-Hop in SF

I moved to San Francisco in the late 2000s, attracted by a certain romanticism, most of it due to the music and art born here in the city.

My early visits to the Bay would always include a stop at Amoeba Music, where I’d spend hours browsing the used CD racks for local hip-hop and electronic releases. It was there that I fell into the seemingly endless treasure trove of Om Records, a small San Francisco house music label that first entered my consciousness at the turn of the millennium via DJ Mark Farina’s downtempo compilation series, Mushroom Jazz.

Every visit yielded another batch of CDs. Comp mixes curated by artists like Kaskade, Groove Armada, and DJ Heather, as well as hip-hop albums like People Under the Stairs’ jazz & soul sample-soaked O.S.T. and Ming + FS’s breakbeat-riddled Hell’s Kitchen. There was the masterfully curated Om Lounge downtempo series — a precursor to the “chill beats to relax to” playlist fodder of today — and an Om: Winter Sessions deep house mix from a then little-known SF DJ named Justin Martin.

In other words, Om’s curation guided my curiosity. After a while, no matter which Om release I took a chance on, it was usually right up my alley.

“The music scene in the city was incredible when we started the label,” says Chris Smith, who co-founded Om Records in 1995. “There were solid club nights seven nights a week for house music, downtempo, acid jazz — and a vibrant hip-hop scene, too, that we commingled with, and that’s what inspired me. We were obviously super into house music, but we wanted to do something that really embodied all of these eclectic sounds.”

After moving to San Francisco in 1992, Smith spent days and months digging through downtempo and European electronic records at stores like BPM, Clear, Zebra and Tweakin. The latter, now home to Vinyl Dreams, is where he met Om co-founder Steve Gray (who moved back to England shortly after the label was founded.)

Smith met Farina at an 11am afterparty at DNA Lounge, where the Mushroom Jazz auteur was dropping tracks that would later appear on Mushroom Jazz Vol. 1. The jazz-, hip-hop- and soul-inflected downtempo series became a phenomenon — from college and club night afterparties to soundtracking buzzy restaurant dining rooms in LA and Miami — and still stands as Om’s most widely recognized output.

Now, three decades and 800+ releases later, Om is not only releasing a 30th anniversary compilation album on May 8th, it’s the focus of a free Day Party on Embarcadero Plaza on Sat, May 9th. Featuring label mainstays Farina, Colette, DJ Heather, J.Boogie and Shiny Objects (Smith’s production moniker), and produced by Another Planet Entertainment (APE) and SF Rec & Parks, it’s one of a growing number of free outdoor concerts meant to generate optimism for the future of San Francisco.

Strangely, Om is hardly a household name in the city these days. The majority of its young residents haven’t been here for a decade, let alone three. And while electronic music would go on to become a big-money industry, coinciding with corporate promoters’ takeover of major markets, Om declined to sign up for the big-room EDM revolution – even as some of the label’s early artists (Kaskade, Martin, Claude VonStroke) went on to help define it.

“There were so many trends that came along that were, in my view, so cheesy,” says Smith. “I have so much respect for what Kaskade did when he left Om, but it’s just not in my DNA; I don’t understand that part of things. Maybe there were opportunities that we may have missed. I’ve just been more programmed into liking underground music.”

If Om has slowed its release calendar in the last decade, it’s because Smith also co-founded local nightclubs in Potrero’s The Great Northern and Downtown’s Monarch, as well as restaurants like The Pawn Shop (adjacent to Monarch) and Sonoma Pizza Co. in Forestville, where he lives with his family. The pizza place takes up most of his time; Om’s longtime GM, Gunnar Hissim, runs the label’s day-to-day operations. Turns out over 20 years of running a dance music label and working in nightlife will burn you out some.

But this weekend, it’s paying off. APE’s Bryan Duquette tells KQED that more than 6,000 people have RSVP’d for the Om Anniversary Day Party.

“We try to work with independent labels and artists that have ties to SF” for the parties APE has produced with the city, Duquette says. “This show in particular has a historical tie to us, because we were booking J.Boogie at gigs at the Elbo Room before APE even existed, when we were still known as Mystery Machine Productions.”

As the 30th anniversary concert gets underway (followed by a night show at Great Northern), one has to wonder if the nostalgia of 800+ releases might be lost on many of the new wave of San Franciscans. It’s no secret that services like Spotify and Apple Music serve up formulaic playlists to listeners who rely solely on their algorithms for a semblance of “discovery.”

The streaming age hasn’t been particularly kind to Om. Smith laments that even though Om was an early beta test partner for iTunes (he remembers meeting Steve Jobs) and early download purchases were big for Om financially, label catalogs were largely left behind in the artist-centric streaming era.

“First it was Napster downloads, then the bottom fell off the CD market and nobody was buying vinyl anymore,” Smith recalls. “We weathered them all, but it was challenging.”

This weekend’s party, then, is affirmation of not just Om Records’ successes, but something that automation has yet to replicate: its good taste.

“We were in the shadows and took a back seat for a minute,” Smith says. “But we’ve never been a label that hops on a trend, like prog house or trance or whatever. We always stuck with what we love.”

Om Records’ 30th Anniversary Day Party takes place Saturday, May 9, from 1–5pm at Embarcadero Plaza in San Francisco. More info here. That night, from 9pm–3am, the party continues at the Great Northern (119 Utah St., San Francisco) with an evening headlined by Derrick Carter. Tickets and more info here.