Fun Fur Ravers Ontario Science Center 1998
Fun Fur Ravers Ontario Science Center 1998
Not everyone wore Fun Fur, but some wore it spectacularly.
Not everyone wore Fun Fur, but some wore it spectacularly.
Across from MuchMusic, at the top of the graffiti covered 162 John St. stairway, you’d find X-STATIC, Canada’s first rave store. The nerve center of Canada’s early rave scene, X-STATIC was a tiny shop packed with DJ Mix tapes, event tickets, rave-wear, and the latest issues of TRIBE MAGAZINE. This is a full page ad they ran in TRIBE in 1994.
Thundergroove at OZ the nightclub on Mercer Street was the house night in Canada in 1994. Every week you could hear the finest house DJs in the world spin in the same small, cramped, booth as the finest house DJs in Canada. This was the night where the industry people hung out – the other DJs, bartenders, waiters, promoters, fashion models, house curious rave kids, the ‘it’ boys and girls. This was where the term ‘industry’ was coined to describe the people who worked in and around the house music, rave or nightclub scene. A distinct subset of people in the Canadian underground. The people who knew. The bar staff who finally had a night off. The house heads. The DJs. The promoters. The flyer people. The people who appreciated and danced to non-mainstream music, weeks or months before anyone else would even hear it.
Derrick Carter DJs from the dancefloor at INDUSTRY nightclub in Toronto in 1998.
INDUSTRY stripped away all the non-essential fluff, creating the perfect environment for dancing to house and other genres of electronic music. Putting the DJ right on the dancefloor in the crowd and the records on the stage is a perfect example of this. FYI, that’s Elon Musk in the green shirt, dancing.