Montreal Mixtapes

DJ mixes and mixtapes from one of North America's most culturally singular electronic music cities - digitized and restored from original cassette tape and CD recordings.

Montreal may not have had its own Second Summer of Love, but the ripples sent across the pond by the UK rave revolution of the late 1980s turned into tidal waves by the time they reached the shores of Canada's cultural capital. Nicknamed disco's second city, Montreal had developed its own distinctive house and electronic sound thanks to its unique position at the conflux of European and American musical influences - a bilingual, bicultural city that absorbed sounds from Chicago, Detroit, Paris, and London simultaneously and filtered them through something that felt entirely its own. The pivotal moment came in March 1993, when a group of university students led by DJ Tiga organized Solstice - one of Montreal's first raves - drawing several thousand people and instantly changing the city's electronic scene. After Solstice, the parties started coming fast and furious - locations revealed only the day before by phone, with ravers gathering at the corner of Milton and Clark to board buses to destinations unknown. As electronic music gained momentum, iconic clubs and after-hours venues emerged, including Stereo, co-founded by Angel Moraes, a former DJ at New York's legendary Paradise Garage. Through the late 1990s and into the 2000s, clubs like Sona, Groove Society, and the Dome, and parties like Swirl and Cream cemented Montreal's reputation as one of the great electronic music cities on the continent.

These tapes document a city where the music mattered deeply and the scene that grew around it was unlike anything else in North America. Restored from analog sources and archived here for the record.