About
It’s more than just throwing a party,
this collective is redefining who gets
to control party culture in San Francisco.
Past,
Present,
and Program’s
Uncharted Future
“We just hung out a lot and he had this thing called Vitamin 1k, he was pretty fresh out in San Francisco as well, so it was just both us being like, here's this city, everyone says it sucks and everything is closed, but its new to us and we’re having a good time,” says Arthur.
Last summer while on the lookout for somewhere new to party in the city I came across Underground SF, a venue located on the edge of Haight Street. Underground is a small venue, the bar takes up a large portion of the space, the DJ booth sits separately on a platform facing a squared dance floor towards the back. Out of all the nights spent at Underground that summer, one event in particular stood out from the rest, a party thrown by Program, a DJ collective.
That night on the line-up of DJs was SoFTT, TRAVIEZA, and b0nitababy, better known now as Erika. I found out about this party when I came across one of Erika’s videos while scrolling through TikTok. @b0nitatababy is where you can find her online, she has over 20k followers and has amassed over 800k likes across all her videos. It was her tagline that drew me into her world, “San Francisco is not dead, you are just partying in the Marina.” It was this declaration of life that instantly hooked me as a viewer. Having never partied in the Marina myself, from the context clues I could easily conclude that it was a bad place to party.
Now, a year later, I can confirm that the Marina is the holy land for all things white; jobs, music, culture, and especially people. A bubble doing its own conservative Midwestern cosplay for some odd reason. For Bay Area locals/individuals looking for events in SF centered outside that bubble of whiteness, who might feel like nothing is happening for them, Erika's promise of curation is enough to get them interested — it got my attention.
Program, like many of their counterparts throwing events in the city today got their start towards the tail end of the pandemic. The story of Program however starts with a different collective altogether, Vitamin1000.
I spoke with Vitamin1000 creator, 27-year-old Wyatt Slatte, over Zoom, as recently he finds himself splitting his time between New York City and SF. Wyatt started Vitamin1000 back in 2018, originally from the Monterey Bay area, he’s been DJing since middle school. Vitamin1000 started as an Instagram page, where Wyatt would post pictures he thought matched the aesthetic of his new collective.
It wouldn’t be until a year later in 2019, when Vitamin1000 would throw their first party at an abandoned military base in Monterey. In 2020, Wyatt moved to the city to start classes at San Francisco State University, that year while he didn’t throw any parties, he started the mix series, Supplement, on Soundcloud.
Before they started Program, 25-year-old Erika Martinez, and 26-year-old Arthur Javier, AKA @sfcowboy, played a key role in establishing Vitamin1000. I met up with Erika and Arthur in early February, at Key Club, a wine bar in the lower Nob Hill neighborhood. From the exterior, it’s a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it establishment, but inside the exposed brick walls, high ceilings, and giant paper lanterns above the bar instantly set it apart. Erika, who was scheduled for a 3-hour set, was stationed on a balcony overlooking a packed venue filled with lively folks enjoying the atmosphere. Arthur sat behind her in a roped-off area.
It was actually Arthur who moved into the city first. After graduating from California State Fullerton in the spring of 2020. He was motivated to move to SF after spending the summer watching culture documentaries and making music in his apartment alone.
“I got really into watching documentaries about San Francisco, I was doing some solo mushroom trips for the first time, just hanging in the room, and I was learning a lot about artists and movements, SF had always been this place that was close to me my whole life but I never really knew much about it,” Arthur explains.
It would be that when it came time to find somewhere to live, Arthur would end up messaging Wyatt, who at the time had listed a room for rent in the Haight-Ashbury neighborhood. According to Arthur, out of everyone in his house, he became the closest with Wyatt, due to their shared interest in electronic music and DJing
It was in 2021, when things started to move again in the city for Wyatt and Arthur, “Around summer 2021 I started going to clubs in SF, just to see what the ecosystem was, to see how these different clubs worked, I was trying to feel out what the sound was, I had heard that it was like burning man kind of stuff, like slow housey, yeah, an older crowd,” Wyatt explains.
That year Vitamin1000 would throw their first party since 2019 out in the Mojave desert, which consisted of Wyatt, Arthur, and their friends playing music on large speakers for hours. “We first started with like renegades in the desert, because that was the only way to have people safely get together, the first one was like four people,” says Arthur.
These illegal renegades in the Mojave desert became somewhat of a repeat event for Vitamin1000 throughout this time, each bigger than the last. 2021 was also the same year Arthur met Erika, “Arthur and I met at the Makeout Room in the Mission, it would turn out that we both had tickets for Outside Lands, which had been moved to Halloween weekend,” says Erika.
At the time, as she points out, she wasn’t interested in hearing electronic music at the festival but followed Arthur and his friends to check out some sets. In the months that followed Erika and Arthur began partying together, but it wasn’t until New Year’s Eve that everything finally clicked for her. On a Molly trip at 1015 Folsom, she saw Peggy Gou, who at the time had just reached her peak as a popular house DJ. Up until that moment, most of the sets Erika had attended were all headlined by male DJs.
“It changed something in me,
immediately afterward I was like, I need to learn how to DJ.”
She briefly mentioned how Arthur once tried to give her a lesson, but her fear of looking stupid in front of others affected her ability to learn from him. It wasn’t until she decided to take his deck and lock herself in her room for a month with nothing but YouTube tutorials that she finally got comfortable performing. She eventually joined the Vitamin1000 crew, not only as a DJ but helping them with marketing for their events.
After a slew of house parties and raves out in the middle of nowhere, something bigger was on the horizon for the Vitamin1000 team. After catching the attention of a club promoter the collective got to play its first club show at Catch One, an iconic dance club in Los Angeles. It was off the heat of this first show that the crew returned to the city and started the process of booking their first club show in SF. An endeavor that quickly manifested for the collective as they booked their first set later that summer at Club Waziema.
It was during the marketing for this show that Erika got her first viral video on TikTok, “I decided to make a TikTok for that, since before I had only been doing Instagram stuff, and the TikTok blew up and that’s where our traction started,” she says.
It was at this point that Vitamin1000 started to pop up everywhere across the city, hosting party after party. “We did like Club Waziema, Underground SF, some of the classic spots, we lined up a few things at Public Works, we did some shows at 1015 and some bigger venues,” says Wyatt.
In the various conversations I've had with people both new and old in the scene, I've posed the following question; what's one thing that sets up a collective to be successful in the long term? There’s more to running a collective than just hosting parties, those who wish to be successful outside of throwing an event or two per year understand the value of building up a brand identity. One major reason why younger collectives often end up dismantling is simply because they have too many cooks in the kitchen.
“It got to a point with Vitamin where after a year Arthur and I just had a lot of creative differences where we liked a more alternative feel, we were a big part of Vitamin with the marketing and getting people to come to the shows but we weren't the creators so we didn’t have that control,” says Erika.
Erika’s push to use TikTok throughout that first year of marketing Vitamin1000 paid off extremely well as it garnered her a following on the app. For Wyatt, using social media apps like Instagram and TikTok never felt like something he wanted to be a part of, more so forced to participate in.
“The changing algorithms and the way they work is so painful, I also just feel gross whenever I'm feeding into it, I just want to do things in a natural way, also the people running these social media platforms are pretty evil, we had a TikTok at one point but we're not using it anymore and I'm not really buying ads on Instagram, I'm just posting when I can,” explains Wyatt.
One thing that sets up collectives to stand the test of time — being intentional with every move they make. Over the past year, Vitamin1000 has slowed down, taking time to restructure, the collective is moving away from hosting regular club nights and is shifting its focus towards outdoor events — where they originally found their footing.
Program officially started in early 2023, fresh off the heels of their electric year with Vitamin1000, Erika, and Arthur were ready to start their own journey. “It was scary, we were leaving an already established thing that we helped make established, and I wasn’t sure what people were going to think, or if anyone was going to follow,” says Erika.
But people quickly caught onto the fact that this social media persona they had been following across the vitamin socials had moved, and they didn’t hesitate to follow her somewhere new. Over the past two years, Program has exploded onto the scene, hosting party after party, they've even taken the momentum outside the bay to clubs in NYC.
It’s hard to describe a Program party in just a few words, it’s also what makes them so unique as a collective. They understand the power of sticking behind an aesthetic and brand image while also knowing when to step outside that box. From New Year’s Eve celebrations headlined by local giants like Bored Lord & Adam Kraft at Arcana to bringing out legends in the global scene like Roni Size to perform at 1015 Folsom — Program is aiming higher than most local collectives would ever dare to.
Since the start of the new year, I've gotten the chance to attend several events thrown by the Program team. The baseline energy at their shows is pretty much always the same, a somewhat younger crowd, (but that could easily change depending on who's performing) lots of black clothing, girls and their gay friends, and a healthy sprinkle of out-of-towners. You’ll know it’s a Program party when you walk in and it looks like Bushwick threw up all over the place.
Program prides itself on throwing inclusive parties prioritizing queer, women, and BIPOC performers. Having a diverse line-up both physically and sonically has only benefited the collective as it keeps their audience coming back for more. It’s easy to be thrown off by a bad party, a confused DJ, men in business casual, obnoxious friend group islands that never merge with the rest of the crowd —, just to name a few vibe killers.
By David Moreno
This has never been the case at a Program function, under those white & red lights, the shaking bass bouncing from wall to wall, sweaty bodies dancing through a thin layer of fog, their silhouettes outlined by strobes of flashing light, here nobody parties alone.
It was during our initial meeting back at Key Club that the duo disclosed a secret project they had been working on since late 2024. They had started the process of opening up their own venue in the city. This secret venue, located on the west side of the city had sat empty since December of 2020.
Owning and operating their own space had always been a long-standing goal for the collective, and now it has consumed the past 4 months of their lives. It’s been all hands on board since they got keys in January, from gutting the bar to repainting the walls and floor. Erika and Arthur along with DJs in their collective have been putting in elbow grease to get the place party ready, aiming for an opening date later this summer.
The venue has a long hallway layout and consists of a bar, a dance floor off to the side, a smaller elevated dance terrace towards the entrance, and the DJ deck is tucked away on a balcony overlooking the space. The duo has been sticking with a ‘less is more’ mentality when approaching the renovations, painting the walls black, and adding chrome details through furniture and light fixtures; it's something they picked up from their trips to NYC clubs. Besides enrolling in a few city-run small business programs which have helped offset the cost of having to pay rent without being open, the collective has been fronting the cost on its own.
In March, they publicly announced that they were opening up a venue, and created a GoFundMe to raise community donations. Investors have come knocking, but Program isn’t looking to give up control of its creative vision anytime soon. On my last trip out to their secret hideout, the duo was hard at work, Erika was painting the previously checkered patterned stairs a dark industrial grey. Arthur demonstrated their brand new sound system which had been installed a week prior, for Program, it's never felt more real.
As summer creeps around the corner, Program should be on everyone's radar. If you haven’t had the chance to attend one of their shows, do yourself a favor and purchase a ticket for one of the hottest parties in the city. One thing is clear, this team is only getting started, and only time will tell if their risk is worth the investment.
About
Past,
Present,
and Program’s
Uncharted Future
It’s more than just throwing a party,
this collective is redefining who gets
to control party culture in San Francisco.
By David M. Figueroa
“We just hung out a lot and he had this thing called Vitamin 1k, he was pretty fresh out in San Francisco as well, so it was just both us being like, here's this city, everyone says it sucks and everything is closed, but its new to us and we’re having a good time,” says Arthur.
Last summer while on the lookout for somewhere new to party in the city I came across Underground SF, a venue located on the edge of Haight Street. Underground is a small venue, the bar takes up a large portion of the space, the DJ booth sits separately on a platform facing a squared dance floor towards the back. Out of all the nights spent at Underground that summer, one event in particular stood out from the rest, a party thrown by Program, a DJ collective.
That night on the line-up of DJs was SoFTT, TRAVIEZA, and b0nitababy, better known now as Erika. I found out about this party when I came across one of Erika’s videos while scrolling through TikTok. @b0nitatababy is where you can find her online, she has over 20k followers and has amassed over 800k likes across all her videos. It was her tagline that drew me into her world, “San Francisco is not dead, you are just partying in the Marina.” It was this declaration of life that instantly hooked me as a viewer. Having never partied in the Marina myself, from the context clues I could easily conclude that it was a bad place to party.
Now, a year later, I can confirm that the Marina is the holy land for all things white; jobs, music, culture, and especially people. A bubble doing its own conservative Midwestern cosplay for some odd reason. For Bay Area locals/individuals looking for events in SF centered outside that bubble of whiteness, who might feel like nothing is happening for them, Erika's promise of curation is enough to get them interested — it got my attention.
Program, like many of their counterparts throwing events in the city today got their start towards the tail end of the pandemic. The story of Program however starts with a different collective altogether, Vitamin1000.
I spoke with Vitamin1000 creator, 27-year-old Wyatt Slatte, over Zoom, as recently he finds himself splitting his time between New York City and SF. Wyatt started Vitamin1000 back in 2018, originally from the Monterey Bay area, he’s been DJing since middle school. Vitamin1000 started as an Instagram page, where Wyatt would post pictures he thought matched the aesthetic of his new collective.
It wouldn’t be until a year later in 2019, when Vitamin1000 would throw their first party at an abandoned military base in Monterey. In 2020, Wyatt moved to the city to start classes at San Francisco State University, that year while he didn’t throw any parties, he started the mix series, Supplement, on Soundcloud.
Before they started Program, 25-year-old Erika Martinez, and 26-year-old Arthur Javier, AKA @sfcowboy, played a key role in establishing Vitamin1000. I met up with Erika and Arthur in early February, at Key Club, a wine bar in the lower Nob Hill neighborhood. From the exterior, it’s a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it establishment, but inside the exposed brick walls, high ceilings, and giant paper lanterns above the bar instantly set it apart. Erika, who was scheduled for a 3-hour set, was stationed on a balcony overlooking a packed venue filled with lively folks enjoying the atmosphere. Arthur sat behind her in a roped-off area.
It was actually Arthur who moved into the city first. After graduating from California State Fullerton in the spring of 2020. He was motivated to move to SF after spending the summer watching culture documentaries and making music in his apartment alone.
“I got really into watching documentaries about San Francisco, I was doing some solo mushroom trips for the first time, just hanging in the room, and I was learning a lot about artists and movements, SF had always been this place that was close to me my whole life but I never really knew much about it,” Arthur explains.
It would be that when it came time to find somewhere to live, Arthur would end up messaging Wyatt, who at the time had listed a room for rent in the Haight-Ashbury neighborhood. According to Arthur, out of everyone in his house, he became the closest with Wyatt, due to their shared interest in electronic music and DJing.
It was in 2021, when things started to move again in the city for Wyatt and Arthur, “Around summer 2021 I started going to clubs in SF, just to see what the ecosystem was, to see how these different clubs worked, I was trying to feel out what the sound was, I had heard that it was like burning man kind of stuff, like slow housey, yeah, an older crowd,” Wyatt explains.
That year Vitamin1000 would throw their first party since 2019 out in the Mojave desert, which consisted of Wyatt, Arthur, and their friends playing music on large speakers for hours. “We first started with like renegades in the desert, because that was the only way to have people safely get together, the first one was like four people,” says Arthur.
These illegal renegades in the Mojave desert became somewhat of a repeat event for Vitamin1000 throughout this time, each bigger than the last. 2021 was also the same year Arthur met Erika, “Arthur and I met at the Makeout Room in the Mission, it would turn out that we both had tickets for Outside Lands, which had been moved to Halloween weekend,” says Erika.
At the time, as she points out, she wasn’t interested in hearing electronic music at the festival but followed Arthur and his friends to check out some sets. In the months that followed Erika and Arthur began partying together, but it wasn’t until New Year’s Eve that everything finally clicked for her. On a Molly trip at 1015 Folsom, she saw Peggy Gou, who at the time had just reached her peak as a popular house DJ. Up until that moment, most of the sets Erika had attended were all headlined by male DJs.
“It changed something in me,
immediately afterward I was
like, I need to learn how to DJ.”
She briefly mentioned how Arthur once tried to give her a lesson, but her fear of looking stupid in front of others affected her ability to learn from him. It wasn’t until she decided to take his deck and lock herself in her room for a month with nothing but YouTube tutorials that she finally got comfortable performing. She eventually joined the Vitamin1000 crew, not only as a DJ but helping them with marketing for their events.
After a slew of house parties and raves out in the middle of nowhere, something bigger was on the horizon for the Vitamin1000 team. After catching the attention of a club promoter the collective got to play its first club show at Catch One, an iconic dance club in Los Angeles. It was off the heat of this first show that the crew returned to the city and started the process of booking their first club show in SF. An endeavor that quickly manifested for the collective as they booked their first set later that summer at Club Waziema.
It was during the marketing for this show that Erika got her first viral video on TikTok, “I decided to make a TikTok for that, since before I had only been doing Instagram stuff, and the TikTok blew up and that’s where our traction started,” she says.
It was at this point that Vitamin1000 started to pop up everywhere across the city, hosting party after party. “We did like Club Waziema, Underground SF, some of the classic spots, we lined up a few things at Public Works, we did some shows at 1015 and some bigger venues,” says Wyatt.
In the various conversations I've had with people both new and old in the scene, I've posed the following question; what's one thing that sets up a collective to be successful in the long term? There’s more to running a collective than just hosting parties, those who wish to be successful outside of throwing an event or two per year understand the value of building up a brand identity. One major reason why younger collectives often end up dismantling is simply because they have too many cooks in the kitchen.
“It got to a point with Vitamin where after a year Arthur and I just had a lot of creative differences where we liked a more alternative feel, we were a big part of Vitamin with the marketing and getting people to come to the shows but we weren't the creators so we didn’t have that control,” says Erika.
Erika’s push to use TikTok throughout that first year of marketing Vitamin1000 paid off extremely well as it garnered her a following on the app. For Wyatt, using social media apps like Instagram and TikTok never felt like something he wanted to be a part of, more so forced to participate in.
“The changing algorithms and the way they work is so painful, I also just feel gross whenever I'm feeding into it, I just want to do things in a natural way, also the people running these social media platforms are pretty evil, we had a TikTok at one point but we're not using it anymore and I'm not really buying ads on Instagram, I'm just posting when I can,” explains Wyatt.
One thing that sets up collectives to stand the test of time — being intentional with every move they make. Over the past year, Vitamin1000 has slowed down, taking time to restructure, the collective is moving away from hosting regular club nights and is shifting its focus towards outdoor events — where they originally found their footing.
Program officially started in early 2023, fresh off the heels of their electric year with Vitamin1000, Erika, and Arthur were ready to start their own journey. “It was scary, we were leaving an already established thing that we helped make established, and I wasn’t sure what people were going to think, or if anyone was going to follow,” says Erika.
But people quickly caught onto the fact that this social media persona they had been following across the vitamin socials had moved, and they didn’t hesitate to follow her somewhere new. Over the past two years, Program has exploded onto the scene, hosting party after party, they've even taken the momentum outside the bay to clubs in NYC.
It’s hard to describe a Program party in just a few words, it’s also what makes them so unique as a collective. They understand the power of sticking behind an aesthetic and brand image while also knowing when to step outside that box. From New Year’s Eve celebrations headlined by local giants like Bored Lord & Adam Kraft at Arcana to bringing out legends in the global scene like Roni Size to perform at 1015 Folsom — Program is aiming higher than most local collectives would ever dare to.
Since the start of the new year, I've gotten the chance to attend several events thrown by the Program team. The baseline energy at their shows is pretty much always the same, a somewhat younger crowd, (but that could easily change depending on who's performing) lots of black clothing, girls and their gay friends, and a healthy sprinkle of out-of-towners. You’ll know it’s a Program party when you walk in and it looks like Bushwick threw up all over the place.
Program prides itself on throwing inclusive parties prioritizing queer, women, and BIPOC performers. Having a diverse line-up both physically and sonically has only benefited the collective as it keeps their audience coming back for more. It’s easy to be thrown off by a bad party, a confused DJ, men in business casual, obnoxious friend group islands that never merge with the rest of the crowd —, just to name a few vibe killers.
It was during our initial meeting back at Key Club that the duo disclosed a secret project they had been working on since late 2024. They had started the process of opening up their own venue in the city. This secret venue, located on the west side of the city had sat empty since December of 2020.
Owning and operating their own space had always been a long-standing goal for the collective, and now it has consumed the past 4 months of their lives. It’s been all hands on board since they got keys in January, from gutting the bar to repainting the walls and floor. Erika and Arthur along with DJs in their collective have been putting in elbow grease to get the place party ready, aiming for an opening date later this summer.
The venue has a long hallway layout and consists of a bar, a dance floor off to the side, a smaller elevated dance terrace towards the entrance, and the DJ deck is tucked away on a balcony overlooking the space. The duo has been sticking with a ‘less is more’ mentality when approaching the renovations, painting the walls black, and adding chrome details through furniture and light fixtures; it's something they picked up from their trips to NYC clubs. Besides enrolling in a few city-run small business programs which have helped offset the cost of having to pay rent without being open, the collective has been fronting the cost on its own.
In March, they publicly announced that they were opening up a venue, and created a GoFundMe to raise community donations. Investors have come knocking, but Program isn’t looking to give up control of its creative vision anytime soon. On my last trip out to their secret hideout, the duo was hard at work, Erika was painting the previously checkered patterned stairs a dark industrial grey. Arthur demonstrated their brand new sound system which had been installed a week prior, for Program, it's never felt more real.
As summer creeps around the corner, Program should be on everyone's radar. If you haven’t had the chance to attend one of their shows, do yourself a favor and purchase a ticket for one of the hottest parties in the city. One thing is clear, this team is only getting started, and only time will tell if their risk is worth the investment.
This has never been the case at a Program function, under those white & red lights, the shaking bass
bouncing from wall to wall, sweaty bodies
dancing through a thin layer of fog,
their silhouettes outlined by strobes
of flashing light, here
nobody parties alone.
About
Past,
Present,
and Program’s
Uncharted Future
It’s more than just throwing a party,
this collective is redefining who gets
to control party culture in San Francisco.
By David Moreno
“We just hung out a lot and he had this thing called Vitamin 1k, he was pretty fresh out in San Francisco as well, so it was just both us being like, here's this city, everyone says it sucks and everything is closed, but its new to us and we’re having a good time,” says Arthur.
Last summer while on the lookout for somewhere new to party in the city I came across Underground SF, a venue located on the edge of Haight Street. Underground is a small venue, the bar takes up a large portion of the space, the DJ booth sits separately on a platform facing a squared dance floor towards the back. Out of all the nights spent at Underground that summer, one event in particular stood out from the rest, a party thrown by Program, a DJ collective.
That night on the line-up of DJs was SoFTT, TRAVIEZA, and b0nitababy, better known now as Erika. I found out about this party when I came across one of Erika’s videos while scrolling through TikTok. @b0nitatababy is where you can find her online, she has over 20k followers and has amassed over 800k likes across all her videos. It was her tagline that drew me into her world, “San Francisco is not dead, you are just partying in the Marina.” It was this declaration of life that instantly hooked me as a viewer. Having never partied in the Marina myself, from the context clues I could easily conclude that it was a bad place to party.
Now, a year later, I can confirm that the Marina is the holy land for all things white; jobs, music, culture, and especially people. A bubble doing its own conservative Midwestern cosplay for some odd reason. For Bay Area locals/individuals looking for events in SF centered outside that bubble of whiteness, who might feel like nothing is happening for them, Erika's promise of curation is enough to get them interested — it got my attention.
Program, like many of their counterparts throwing events in the city today got their start towards the tail end of the pandemic. The story of Program however starts with a different collective altogether, Vitamin1000.
I spoke with Vitamin1000 creator, 27-year-old Wyatt Slatte, over Zoom, as recently he finds himself splitting his time between New York City and SF. Wyatt started Vitamin1000 back in 2018, originally from the Monterey Bay area, he’s been DJing since middle school. Vitamin1000 started as an Instagram page, where Wyatt would post pictures he thought matched the aesthetic of his new collective.
It wouldn’t be until a year later in 2019, when Vitamin1000 would throw their first party at an abandoned military base in Monterey. In 2020, Wyatt moved to the city to start classes at San Francisco State University, that year while he didn’t throw any parties, he started the mix series, Supplement, on Soundcloud.
Before they started Program, 25-year-old Erika Martinez, and 26-year-old Arthur Javier, AKA @sfcowboy, played a key role in establishing Vitamin1000. I met up with Erika and Arthur in early February, at Key Club, a wine bar in the lower Nob Hill neighborhood. From the exterior, it’s a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it establishment, but inside the exposed brick walls, high ceilings, and giant paper lanterns above the bar instantly set it apart. Erika, who was scheduled for a 3-hour set, was stationed on a balcony overlooking a packed venue filled with lively folks enjoying the atmosphere. Arthur sat behind her in a roped-off area.
It was actually Arthur who moved into the city first. After graduating from California State Fullerton in the spring of 2020. He was motivated to move to SF after spending the summer watching culture documentaries and making music in his apartment alone.
“I got really into watching documentaries about San Francisco, I was doing some solo mushroom trips for the first time, just hanging in the room, and I was learning a lot about artists and movements, SF had always been this place that was close to me my whole life but I never really knew much about it,” Arthur explains.
It would be that when it came time to find somewhere to live, Arthur would end up messaging Wyatt, who at the time had listed a room for rent in the Haight-Ashbury neighborhood. According to Arthur, out of everyone in his house, he became the closest with Wyatt, due to their shared interest in electronic music and DJing.
It was in 2021, when things started to move again in the city for Wyatt and Arthur, “Around summer 2021 I started going to clubs in SF, just to see what the ecosystem was, to see how these different clubs worked, I was trying to feel out what the sound was, I had heard that it was like burning man kind of stuff, like slow housey, yeah, an older crowd,” Wyatt explains.
That year Vitamin1000 would throw their first party since 2019 out in the Mojave desert, which consisted of Wyatt, Arthur, and their friends playing music on large speakers for hours. “We first started with like renegades in the desert, because that was the only way to have people safely get together, the first one was like four people,” says Arthur.
These illegal renegades in the Mojave desert became somewhat of a repeat event for Vitamin1000 throughout this time, each bigger than the last. 2021 was also the same year Arthur met Erika, “Arthur and I met at the Makeout Room in the Mission, it would turn out that we both had tickets for Outside Lands, which had been moved to Halloween weekend,” says Erika.
At the time, as she points out, she wasn’t interested in hearing electronic music at the festival but followed Arthur and his friends to check out some sets. In the months that followed Erika and Arthur began partying together, but it wasn’t until New Year’s Eve that everything finally clicked for her. On a Molly trip at 1015 Folsom, she saw Peggy Gou, who at the time had just reached her peak as a popular house DJ. Up until that moment, most of the sets Erika had attended were all headlined by male DJs.
“It changed something in me,
immediately afterward I was
like, I need to learn how to DJ.”
She briefly mentioned how Arthur once tried to give her a lesson, but her fear of looking stupid in front of others affected her ability to learn from him. It wasn’t until she decided to take his deck and lock herself in her room for a month with nothing but YouTube tutorials that she finally got comfortable performing. She eventually joined the Vitamin1000 crew, not only as a DJ but helping them with marketing for their events.
After a slew of house parties and raves out in the middle of nowhere, something bigger was on the horizon for the Vitamin1000 team. After catching the attention of a club promoter the collective got to play its first club show at Catch One, an iconic dance club in Los Angeles. It was off the heat of this first show that the crew returned to the city and started the process of booking their first club show in SF. An endeavor that quickly manifested for the collective as they booked their first set later that summer at Club Waziema.
It was during the marketing for this show that Erika got her first viral video on TikTok, “I decided to make a TikTok for that, since before I had only been doing Instagram stuff, and the TikTok blew up and that’s where our traction started,” she says.
It was at this point that Vitamin1000 started to pop up everywhere across the city, hosting party after party. “We did like Club Waziema, Underground SF, some of the classic spots, we lined up a few things at Public Works, we did some shows at 1015 and some bigger venues,” says Wyatt.
In the various conversations I've had with people both new and old in the scene, I've posed the following question; what's one thing that sets up a collective to be successful in the long term? There’s more to running a collective than just hosting parties, those who wish to be successful outside of throwing an event or two per year understand the value of building up a brand identity. One major reason why younger collectives often end up dismantling is simply because they have too many cooks in the kitchen.
“It got to a point with Vitamin where after a year Arthur and I just had a lot of creative differences where we liked a more alternative feel, we were a big part of Vitamin with the marketing and getting people to come to the shows but we weren't the creators so we didn’t have that control,” says Erika.
Erika’s push to use TikTok throughout that first year of marketing Vitamin1000 paid off extremely well as it garnered her a following on the app. For Wyatt, using social media apps like Instagram and TikTok never felt like something he wanted to be a part of, more so forced to participate in.
“The changing algorithms and the way they work is so painful, I also just feel gross whenever I'm feeding into it, I just want to do things in a natural way, also the people running these social media platforms are pretty evil, we had a TikTok at one point but we're not using it anymore and I'm not really buying ads on Instagram, I'm just posting when I can,” explains Wyatt.
One thing that sets up collectives to stand the test of time — being intentional with every move they make. Over the past year, Vitamin1000 has slowed down, taking time to restructure, the collective is moving away from hosting regular club nights and is shifting its focus towards outdoor events — where they originally found their footing.
Program officially started in early 2023, fresh off the heels of their electric year with Vitamin1000, Erika, and Arthur were ready to start their own journey. “It was scary, we were leaving an already established thing that we helped make established, and I wasn’t sure what people were going to think, or if anyone was going to follow,” says Erika.
But people quickly caught onto the fact that this social media persona they had been following across the vitamin socials had moved, and they didn’t hesitate to follow her somewhere new. Over the past two years, Program has exploded onto the scene, hosting party after party, they've even taken the momentum outside the bay to clubs in NYC.
It’s hard to describe a Program party in just a few words, it’s also what makes them so unique as a collective. They understand the power of sticking behind an aesthetic and brand image while also knowing when to step outside that box. From New Year’s Eve celebrations headlined by local giants like Bored Lord & Adam Kraft at Arcana to bringing out legends in the global scene like Roni Size to perform at 1015 Folsom — Program is aiming higher than most local collectives would ever dare to.
Since the start of the new year, I've gotten the chance to attend several events thrown by the Program team. The baseline energy at their shows is pretty much always the same, a somewhat younger crowd, (but that could easily change depending on who's performing) lots of black clothing, girls and their gay friends, and a healthy sprinkle of out-of-towners. You’ll know it’s a Program party when you walk in and it looks like Bushwick threw up all over the place.
Program prides itself on throwing inclusive parties prioritizing queer, women, and BIPOC performers. Having a diverse line-up both physically and sonically has only benefited the collective as it keeps their audience coming back for more. It’s easy to be thrown off by a bad party, a confused DJ, men in business casual, obnoxious friend group islands that never merge with the rest of the crowd —, just to name a few vibe killers.
It was during our initial meeting back at Key Club that the duo disclosed a secret project they had been working on since late 2024. They had started the process of opening up their own venue in the city. This secret venue, located on the west side of the city had sat empty since December of 2020.
Owning and operating their own space had always been a long-standing goal for the collective, and now it has consumed the past 4 months of their lives. It’s been all hands on board since they got keys in January, from gutting the bar to repainting the walls and floor. Erika and Arthur along with DJs in their collective have been putting in elbow grease to get the place party ready, aiming for an opening date later this summer.
The venue has a long hallway layout and consists of a bar, a dance floor off to the side, a smaller elevated dance terrace towards the entrance, and the DJ deck is tucked away on a balcony overlooking the space. The duo has been sticking with a ‘less is more’ mentality when approaching the renovations, painting the walls black, and adding chrome details through furniture and light fixtures; it's something they picked up from their trips to NYC clubs. Besides enrolling in a few city-run small business programs which have helped offset the cost of having to pay rent without being open, the collective has been fronting the cost on its own.
In March, they publicly announced that they were opening up a venue, and created a GoFundMe to raise community donations. Investors have come knocking, but Program isn’t looking to give up control of its creative vision anytime soon. On my last trip out to their secret hideout, the duo was hard at work, Erika was painting the previously checkered patterned stairs a dark industrial grey. Arthur demonstrated their brand new sound system which had been installed a week prior, for Program, it's never felt more real.
As summer creeps around the corner, Program should be on everyone's radar. If you haven’t had the chance to attend one of their shows, do yourself a favor and purchase a ticket for one of the hottest parties in the city. One thing is clear, this team is only getting started, and only time will tell if their risk is worth the investment.
This has never been the case at a Program function, under those white & red lights, the shaking bass bouncing from wall to wall, sweaty bodies dancing through a thin layer of fog, their silhouettes outlined by strobes of flashing light, here nobody parties alone.