Why Is It Called Mushroom Jazz? Mark Farina Tells the Psychedelic Story Behind the Name

In the early ’90s, Mark Farina named a genre after mushrooms as a riff on acid jazz. Thirty-five years later, he tells the psychedelic story behind it, and the myco community is gathering in Miami before his Halloween set with Nutritious.

Some names arrive by accident. A half-joke among friends, a passing thought in an altered state of consciousness and, years later, the cornerstone of an entire subculture. Big bangs tend to happen that way: untimely, untamed, wild. An unexpected turn, a ricochet, a cosmic spell and boom… something really big happens.

The fable goes that, in the early nineties, while Chicago’s legendary house scene was hammering the dance floors, a young Mark Farina was looking for a crack through which to breathe. And the answer to that suffocation didn’t come from a marketing calculation or a record-label strategy: it emerged from a cassette tape recorded for the car, hours of reading about the pioneering countercultural figure Timothy Leary, trips (literal and otherwise) to rock shows and a whole lot of lysergic drift that transformed acid jazz into something of its own, organic and earthy: Mushroom Jazz.

Thirty-five years after those first cassettes circulated among the tables at Gramophone Records, the story comes full circle this Halloween 2026 in the city of Miami. And this isn’t just about nostalgia (which would be perfectly legitimate, hey, long live nostalgia, fuel for a dozen modern milestones in the cultural industries), but rather about the reunion between chill electronic music and the global mycological community that is now taking another turn and reinterpreting the ritual of the dance floor.

From a historical perspective, to grasp the germ of Mushroom Jazz, we have to go back to Chicago and the American Midwest of the late eighties. There, amid the effervescence of rave culture and the fascination with British acid jazz, Farina and his group of friends experimented with psychedelics, metaphysical readings and homemade set & setting design.

In that sense, Mark recalls: “Mushroom Jazz came out of the fact that we were dabbling in psychedelics back then. I remember the first time I came across the term ‘acid jazz’… we thought it was kind of funny. We were like, ‘Acid jazz? That’s such a weird concept.’ So Mushroom Jazz was sort of an organic take on acid jazz, since we were experimenting with all kinds of psychedelics at the time.”

For example, that search was not improvised. It included books by Peruvian-born American author Carlos Castaneda, sessions with rented smoke machines that ended in domestic disasters, and makeshift refuges in the basement of a friend’s father’s print shop. Once again, another revolution was unconsciously born in the slimy tentacles of the under.

At the same time, trips to see live bands (specifically the Grateful Dead, fathers of rock psychedelia) contributed the true community philosophy. However, Farina clarifies that he never became a classic Deadhead, but the atmosphere marked him forever. In his words: “What we really connected with was the vibe. People were nice, friendly and sharing. It didn’t matter if you were green, brown, purple, yellow or red, or what you were into… One time we went to a new outdoor venue in northern Indiana with tickets to a sold-out show, and we ended up trading them. My friend got an insanely huge bud, and I got a big bag of really strong mushrooms. We figured we wouldn’t be too upset about missing the show. We were there for the experience.” A fact transformative enough to bring it up a whole bunch of years later. We know it: there are experiences that transform.

Thus, that free spirit intertwined with the search for altered states found its musical channel when Farina began working in the B room (the secondary room, so to speak) of a Chicago club, a space called the Paramount Room. While the main dance floor played the fast-paced house that dominated the city (and was already beginning to reverberate onto dance floors in other latitudes), the B-Room—equipped with old couches and lamps bought at thrift stores—became a sanctuary of slowing down. Less is more.

There, combining downtempo, East Coast hip-hop and jazzy nuances, a sound was born that, in Farina’s words, became “the tape you’d put on before the party to get in the groove, or after, when you got home and needed to chill.” Recorded on 100-minute Maxell XLII-S tapes, those mixes started outselling some of the house tapes behind the counter at Gramophone and, eventually, because that’s how cultural boiling points work, that same underground little thing grew into one of the defining sounds of downtempo.

In fact, the impact of that proposal resonated throughout an entire generation of DJs. Among them was Nutritious, a key figure in the New York scene, founding member of the psychedelics publication DoubleBlind and co-founder of Liquid Culture Records. For Nutritious, the continued relevance of the analog format and live vinyl manipulation are not an aesthetic stance, but a tool for altering time on the dance floor. He says: “Time, tone and frequency all sit on a spectrum, and all of them can be bent. With three or four decks and FX, I can stretch a breakdown, hold a room before the drop, or pitch a record somewhere nobody saw coming. Over several hours, that changes how a room breathes and moves together. Vinyl makes it physical because your hands are actually on the sound.” There is a phrase that is used today among the cool and modern critics that could stand as a dogma for this universe: low tech, high life.

This physical manipulation of sound connects directly with the ancestral tradition of using rhythm and movement as a vehicle for transcendence. For the Liquid Culture Records team, the party space functions as a modern ceremonial container where club culture recovers its ritual dimension. As Nutritious says of his release Divinity, it “was built on the idea that entheogens do more than heal. They can reconnect us to something larger than ourselves. A dancefloor does the same thing. Every ancient culture used sound and movement as ceremony, the club is one of the few places where that survived.”

And so, thirty-five years after the birth of the term, Farina’s music crosses paths with the cosmos known as the “mycological renaissance.” What?! What’s that? Here we go: awareness of psychedelic mushrooms, natural medicine and ecology are transforming not only science, but also the dynamics of nightlife. According to Nutritious, today’s audience is looking for a much more conscious and integrated experience within nightlife culture. “The bigger shift is agency. As stigma fades and medical and ceremonial access grows, people are taking ownership of their wellbeing, and they bring that into nightlife. They want to leave a party feeling better than when they walked in. Crowds are more present now, and they listen more closely,” Nutritious says.

Meanwhile, this Saturday, October 31, at ZeyZey in Miami, the night will open at 6 p.m. with the Miami Mushroom Happy Hour, a gathering presented by Phoenix Rising Psychedelic Speakeasy and Mycopreneur with Liquid Culture Records. Mushroom costumes are strongly encouraged. There, leaders of the global mycological community, entrepreneurs and mushroom enthusiasts will gather in a tropical garden before Farina, Nutritious and Chuck Love perform.

The Mushroom Happy Hour starts at 6 p.m., and the music runs from 8 p.m. to close on ZeyZey’s Zaku Stage and Tima Disco, in Miami’s Little River neighborhood. Tickets range from free to $64.15.

At the same time, Farina continues to tour. With more than 100 performances a year, his YouTube program with Defected and the Billboard chart success of Mushroom Jazz 8 demonstrate that the downtempo formula remains as alive as it was back in the days when hand-dubbed cassettes circulated like a virus. For the Miami show and its overlap with the mycological community, Farina reflects: “It’s very exciting, and having the mushroom community join us is an added bonus… Being intentional and creating a real set and setting for an event like this really enhances the whole vibe.” As for the set itself, he doesn’t plan much ahead: “I just bring a batch of ingredients and see where it goes.” Playing alongside multi-instrumentalist Chuck Love, he picks stripped-back tracks that leave room to improvise. “Sometimes less is more.” Once again: less can be more.

What began as a tiny, introspective, homemade refuge now stands as a robust, broad and established movement. And thirty-five years later, Mushroom Jazz shows that electronic music not only serves to accelerate the beat of the kokoro, alter our pulses and give us states of grace, but also to share with the community everything that, sometimes, we lack in everyday life: stopping, listening and reconnecting with the elemental. From something tiny, something much bigger. Ray Bradbury hinted at it back in 1962, in his sci-fi story “Come into My Cellar,” where mushrooms grown in a dark basement quietly spread until they are everywhere.