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.

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