SUNNY SIDE UP MEMORIAL DAY WEEKEND SUNDAY MAY 24TH, 2026 11PM TIL ???
4O THIEVES
Founded in San Francisco in 2005, 40 Thieves is a long-running production collective operating somewhere between cosmic disco outfit, remix service, expert equipment breakers, and ongoing excuse to buy more records. Corey Black, Layne Fox, and Jay Williams remain at the center of the project, steering it through two decades of selective releases, questionable sleep schedules, and a stubborn commitment to doing things the long way around.
Drawing from dub, post-punk, psychedelic Hobbit rock, disco obscuro, early house, leftfield pop, film soundtracks and early morning AM radio, the Thieves’ catalog favors atmosphere, musicianship, and narrative. Their records are designed less for feverish consumption than for DJs, collectors, dancers, and people who still care about b-side dubs.
Over the years the collective has released music on a wide spectrum of influential underground labels including Leng Records and sister imprint Claremont 56, Permanent Vacation, Rong Music, Strut, DFA, Roam, Tirk, Public Release, Emotional Rescue, and their own Smash Hit Music Co. They’ve remixed an unusually broad cast of artists ranging from Cymande and Kid Creole & The Coconuts to Johnny Dynell and Noam Chomsky, a sentence that still sounds slightly fabricated even to them.
Their work has been championed by a diverse circle of selectors and cultural lifers including the late great Andrew Weatherall, DJ Harvey, James Murphy, Greg Wilson, Sean Johnston, Colleen “Cosmo” Murphy, and Bill Brewster. Those endorsements helped establish 40 Thieves as a quietly dependable presence within the international disco and leftfield underground: never especially fashionable, but reliably somewhere nearby when the good records start coming out.
Outside the studio, the Thieves continue to maintain a selective DJ schedule, bringing the same eclecticism and slow-burn sensibility into clubs, festivals, radio shows and parties that end on a Tuesday. Sets move freely between dubbed-out disco, oddball edits, psychedelic detours, forgotten post-punk, machine funk, and whatever else seems emotionally necessary at the time.
SUNNY SIDE UP RESIDENT DJ'S
JUNIOR
DEWEY CHAN