Spare Parts with Michael Serafini

Spare Parts is a new party from Dean Raymond, former station manager at WHPK 88.5 FM and longtime curator of the station’s residency at the California Clipper. After years curating and booking under the WHPK banner, this marks the launch of his first standalone concept. The goal is straightforward: to carve out space for the strain of house music that got weird again in the early 2000s and never really looked back. As the gloss of late-’90s deep house and progressive faded, a new sound emerged—raw, cheeky, and emotionally sideways. Producers like In Flagranti, Chicken Lips, and Headman raided the discarded machinery of decades past—tape echoes, 303s, MPCs—and fused it with live bass, dub effects, disco irreverence, and rebellious, post-punk energy. Labels like DFA, Gomma, and Output twisted the DNA of house into something freakier: punk-funk for basements, side rooms, and smoke machines. It was sleazy, it was loopy, and it absolutely grooved. That spirit is the heart of Spare Parts. It’s not nostalgia—it’s a mutation. And it’s still mutating. Today, that energy lives on in the acid-damaged sleaze of Decius, the glamour-rot of Phantasy Sound, and the dark wit of Les Disques De La Mort. They’re not reviving anything—they’re carrying a lineage forward. For the first event, we're honored to host none other than Michael Serafini—Smartbar resident, owner of Gramaphone Records, and a living connector between generations of Chicago dance music. He’s seen it all, but this night asks him to go digging—not just for classics, but for that distinct, mutated current that still runs through the underground. Finally, Dean is joined by AI DAN, a fellow WHPK alum now based in California. He came up through Chicago’s techno scene but got into dance music the way a lot of us did—through LCD Soundsystem and a stolen aux cable. He's since gone deep, but that origin story still lingers in the best way: gritty, groovy, and unpretentious. Spare Parts is for that sound: low-slung, machine-made, emotionally bent. Funk that forgot to shave. Disco with its wires showing. Come sweat it out.