Diplo is putting on one of his signature Higher Ground parties at the Great Northern in San Francisco this weekend. The event starts at 3 pm on Saturday and goes until 9 am Sunday morning, so be prepared for a lot of dancing, music, and a bit of endurance. Joining Diplo behind the decks is Green Velvet, Danny Daze, Major League DJz, noodles, Joeski, Baklava, DJ M3, DJ Dials, and Nonsuit.
Growing up in and around Miami, Diplo (real name Thomas Wesley Pentz) started his DJ career at WPRK, the local college radio station at University of Central Florida, where he was a student at the time. Transferring to Temple University, Pentz began to get more notice in the Philadelphia music scene. After a time in India at age 20, when he traveled the country on a used Enfield motorcycle, Diplo returned to the US and began throwing parties and DJing in Philadelphia. Gaining renown, Diplo put out his first solo album, Florida, on Ninja Tune records.
Building his own studio off the success of his parties, Diplo ramped up his production with other artists, most notably producing the song “Paper Planes” with M.I.A. in 2008, which has since gone three times Platinum in the United States. Gaining renown, Diplo began working with artists like Kid Cudi, Bruno Mars, and Usher, and his Mad Decent record label began to become a household name in electronic music circles. In the mid-2010s, Diplo began a variety of projects and collaborations, such as Major Lazer (Diplo and Switch), Jack Ü (Diplo and Skrillex), and LSD (Diplo, Sia, and Labrinth).
Diplo has become one of the most well-known DJs in the world, and his interests and passion for music of all genres has continued to inform the directions in which he takes his productions and DJ sets. It also means that he gets asked to play a broad range of venues and events, and isn’t boxed into one genre (he recently produced a country album, ‘Thomas Wesley: Chapter 2 – Swamp Savant’, and an Amapiano record with Major League DJz). As he explained in a recent interview with Katie Bain of Billboard, “I’m a different kind of DJ, where I might do Major Lazer one day and have to go do a Diplo deep house set another night. And I love that, because it makes it really fresh for me. I don’t ever get bored of playing, which a lot of DJs do. I feel lucky that I have a lot of different avenues.”
Higher Ground is the house music record label that Diplo started a few years ago, and he has been throwing occasional parties under the name since then (at places like New York Fashion Week and Coachella, as well as at pop-up parties like this one in San Francisco and past ones in London, Brooklyn, Los Angeles, and Seattle). It’s bound to be a fantastic afternoon, night, and morning of dancing and house music, and you can get tickets for it now at AXS.
Location: The Great Northern
Address: 119 Utah St, San Francisco, CA 94103
Doors Open: 3 pm
Age: 21+
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