Toronto Mixtapes

DJ mixes and mixtapes from one of North America's most vibrant and ambitious rave cities - digitized and restored from original cassette tape and CD recordings.

Toronto built one of the biggest and most creative underground dance music scenes on the continent, and it did it fast. What began as small warehouse parties in the downtown core quickly grew into something extraordinary - promoters like Chemistry, Nitrous, and Pleasure Force were booking international acts, blacking out bus windows to keep party locations secret, and staging events at venues as unlikely as the Ontario Science Centre and the CN Tower. By the late 1990s, larger events were pulling crowds of over 10,000, making Toronto one of the undisputed rave capitals of North America. The city's early electronic music identity was shaped in part at 23 Hop, a warehouse space at 318 Richmond Street West in what would become Toronto's Entertainment District - an unlicensed after-hours venue where DJ Chris Sheppard helped define what a Toronto rave could sound like. Running alongside the warehouse circuit were the underground clubs - venues like the notorious Bassmint at Bathurst and Queen, and the Liberty Building loft parties on Church and Richmond - where local heroes like Kenny Glasgow, Jelo, and Kevin Williams built cult followings playing to the city's most discerning dance music crowds. When the city moved to ban raves in 1999 following drug-related deaths, the community fought back - organizing a protest rally in Nathan Phillips Square that drew approximately 20,000 people, with speeches from former mayors alongside sets from Derrick Carter, Bad Boy Bill, Ed Rush & Optical, and local heroes Dr Trance and Kenny Glasgow.

These tapes document a city that went all in on underground dance culture and built something that rivaled anything happening south of the border. Restored from analog sources and archived here for the record.