About

The Human

My name is Chris Lum. I'm a house music producer, DJ, and label co-founder who spent the better part of twenty-five years inside Bay Area underground dance culture — working in record stores, DJ'ing, making music, building a studio, running a label, curating a community, and eventually losing myself and my health in the weight of it all. I retired in 2015 to focus on family and healing. This project marks my return to creating and expressing myself once again.

The Custodian is my attempt to understand what that 25 journey actually meant. It's not a comeback. It's not simply a nostalgia project. It's a long-form inquiry into the music, the culture, the people, and the years that shaped me — told honestly, from someone who has deep on the inside. It's storytelling with the benefit of distance and hard-won perspective.

The Blog

This blog will feature writing that will move chronologically through my life — from finding the rave in 1990 to handing in the keys to Moulton Media in 2015. Beginning in Los Angeles and San Francisco's early underground house music scene, through the Moulton Studios era on Polk Street, and ending in 2015 — when the doors closed on the place where everything came together and eventually came apart. Each entry is a chapter in that story.

The Music

Alongside the writing, new original music will be released through
Moulton Music — the label I co-founded and am now returning to.

Each release is rooted in a specific era of the journey. A source track from that period becomes the starting point — something I heard and felt deeply at the time. The new music I'll write will be my attempt to investigate that feeling, understand what conditions helped shape it, and try to summon it again through a contemporary lens. Releases will be paired with selections from my own back catalog — each a sonic companion to the story being written, not simply a recreation of the past, but a conversation with it. Rooted in the vibes of the eras I experienced but reinterpreted through a lens of a healed soul.

The Reason

This project is a true compulsion — something I felt drawn to investigate. My hope is that through this exploration, I create something meaningful to pass forward.

I’m not chasing the same things I used to. I am not operating from the same mindset nor am I creating under the same pressurized conditions. I have nothing to prove. I’m simply pursuing an idea. I am pulling on a thread. House music gave me an interesting life. Now I want to explore that with you and talk about what that life was actually like — where the music in me came from and what it cost.

The Support

This project is free to read and explore. That said, if something here moves you and you'd like to say so with a few dollars, I'm grateful.
Venmo: @TheChrisLum

Thank you,

~Lum