Getting Into the Underground Scene Around Oakland Hills and Fairfax
I started noticing patterns in how people approached the music and art scene around the Oakland Hills area last year. There's a lot of surface-level content out there — blog posts that list the same three venues everyone knows about. But if you actually spend time in these neighborhoods, specifically the stretch between Fairfax and the Oakland Hills foothills, there's a different layer of activity that doesn't show up on Google Maps. I spent about eight months mapping this out properly. The Fairfax Underground project, sometimes called Fairfax Underground Loops, is a collective of musicians, producers, and visual artists operating out of Marin County's Fairfax community. It's not a record label. It's not an organization with a website or a mailing list you can subscribe to. It operates mostly through word of mouth, Instagram Stories that disappear, and a shared Drive folder that gets updated whenever someone drops a new session file. The "loops" part of the name comes from their signature workflow — they build tracks by trading bare loop files back and forth, layering each other's contributions remotely before coming together for live recordings. Most of their output never gets commercially released. Some of it surfaces on Bandcamp under various pseudonyms. Most of it lives on drives and USBs circulated at shows. Here's the thing nobody really explains about how this actually works in practice. You can't just download the music. The best recordings are the ones that were never meant to leave the room. I tried this for a while — downloading whatever I could find on tape trading forums and Reddit threads. What I got back was acceptable at best. Room mics recorded on phone hardware, audio that had been run through three rounds of compression because someone uploaded it to YouTube and then re-downloaded it. You miss the actual texture of the recordings that way. The range gets crushed. The room ambience disappears. It sounds like a demo of a demo.
So the real method is showing up. Not to any scheduled event — there aren't any. You go to the small venues in the area where these people play their day jobs and then stay afterward. The Fairfax Bar is the obvious starting point, but it's also the most tourist-trapped. Look instead for the pop-ups at closed coffee shops in El Sobrante, the garage shows in Alameda that get listed on community bulletin boards inside laundromats, the studio open houses that happen in residential neighborhoods in Oakland Hills without any online promotion. I found my first legitimate field recording from one of these sessions at a house on Camino Pablo — a Tuesday night get-together that nobody advertised. The host's neighbor posted a single Instagram story with a timestamp and a street address. That was the entire invitation. I should mention a specific problem I ran into early on. I tracked down what I thought was a Fairfax Underground session at a venue on Shafter Avenue in Oakland. Got there, set up my field recorder, and realized halfway through that the band playing was a cover group doing radio hits. The actual Underground session was happening two blocks away in a converted auto shop on 69th Street — same night, same general area, zero overlap in promotion. This happens constantly. The scene is deliberately porous and diffuse. Events bleed into each other geographically. I learned to stop trusting single sources and started cross-referencing three or four different Instagram accounts, Discord servers, and local message boards before committing to any location. Now I use a simple spreadsheet to track confirmed versus rumored appearances. It saves me about forty percent of wasted trips. On the technical side, here's what actually matters when you're trying to capture these sessions properly. A decent handheld recorder like a Zoom H6 or even a Tascam DR-40X will get you usable material if you position yourself carefully. The worst mistake beginners make is sitting near the amps or the speaker stacks. You get everything muddy. I usually position myself about six to eight feet back from the stage area, slightly off to one side rather than dead center. That gives you a balanced room capture without overwhelming the direct sound. Set your recording levels so the loudest peaks hit around -12dB. Don't go into the red. These sessions are dynamic — quiet passages followed by loud bursts — and if you clip once, you've lost that track entirely.
Another detail people overlook is the importance of documenting context. A clean recording of a track is useful, but without knowing when and where it was recorded, who played on it, and what equipment was running, the file becomes nearly worthless for anyone trying to understand what's actually happening. I keep a simple text file next to every recording I make. Date, time, location, names of people I spoke to, gear I observed, and any notes about the session's informal structure — whether they were improvising, working from written parts, or rebuilding old recordings live. This takes about ninety seconds per session. Years later, it makes the difference between a mysterious audio file and a documented artifact. There are real limitations to this approach that you should understand before investing time. The scene is small and somewhat insular. If you come in appearing to extract content without contributing anything — without buying a drink, without staying for the full set, without engaging with the actual community — you will notice a change in reception pretty quickly. People are friendly enough at first, but they'll stop mentioning where the next session is. I've seen this happen to several other documentarians. The workaround is simple: participate first, record second. Play in a jam session if you can. Buy merchandise. Introduce yourself to people whose work you genuinely admire before pulling out a recorder. This isn't ethics theater — it's the actual mechanism by which access is granted and maintained in these environments. The other limitation is archival decay. I've lost recordings to hard drive failures, corrupted files, and misplaced SD cards. It sounds obvious, but I still see people treating field recordings as disposable. Always make three copies immediately after a session. Two on separate physical drives, one in cloud storage. The files I regret losing most are the ones I assumed I'd have time to back up later. None of those people had time later.
Get the Full Details
If your goal is just to hear the music rather than document it, your options are narrower but simpler. Search for related artist names on Bandcamp, SoundCloud, and Discogs. The Fairfax Underground Loops members release solo work under different project names regularly. Check the credits on any local Marin County releases — several key members have appeared on records by artists in the Berkeley and Oakland experimental scenes. Those appearances often contain the highest-quality studio recordings associated with this collective. YouTube has some live footage, but as I noted earlier, the audio quality is degraded through multiple re-encodings. Prefer anything sourced directly from the artists' own channels over third-party uploads. One counter-intuitive insight about this scene that most beginners miss: the rawest, least polished recordings are often the most musically interesting. The Fairfax Underground aesthetic values imperfection deliberately. Mistakes become compositional elements. Bad acoustics become part of the arrangement. If you're approaching this expecting tight, professional-sounding productions, you'll be disappointed and you'll also be missing the actual point of what they're doing. Listen for the space between the notes, the ambient noise that becomes rhythm, the improvisational choices that happen when someone misses a cue and decides to run with it anyway. That's where the work actually lives.
