Music has ruled Mark Farina's every step, since his vibrant youth: days spent marching routines with a trumpet in his Chicago high school's band blurred into wild nights stomping around hardcore and punk shows. Eventually persuading his parents to allow him to ditch the brass bugle and bring a drum set into the house, Mark held the beat down for a New Wave alternative cover band (reworking The The, The Smiths, The Cure, Front 242, Ministry and the like) that tore through countless garages, gymnasiums, churches and Battle of the Bands. As Mark's musical tastes took a turn for the electronic, he dove head-first into the luscious world of turntables and nightclubs, a shift reflected by his band becoming the high school's first to incorporate a drum machine in its setup. Zealously weaving in and out of late-night teen clubs in-between his electronic band's shows, Mark celebrated his first solo DJ gig at the Chicagoan underage mecca, Medusa's, at the age of 16. With Chicago being such a close-knit scene, Mark eventually bumped shoulders with many of the scene innovators at Gramaphone, "a huge record store in Chicago, everybody worked there at some point - Derrick Carter, Ralphie Rosario, J Dub, DJ Heather - we're all a big family." It was only a matter of time before his residency at Medusa's spread over to one of Chicago's most seminal nightclubs, Smartbar. With his DJing career rapidly unfolding layers, Mark joined minds and rooms with emerging DJs Derrick Carter and Chris Nazuka, living in a loft space they fondly called "Rednail". Named off the back of Carter's Rednail Kidz productions, the loft took on a life of its own and became home for raucous parties and their first productions, and inspired their phone number (R-E-D-N-A-I-L). Producing under the moniker Symbols & Instruments, the synergistic trio's most important (for the Chicago scene, and electronic music in general) production is, to this day, credited as the "first ambient house" tune: the KMS classic "Mood."

Reaping the rapt success of Chicagoan productions like "Mood," DJs from different corners of the country began flying in to the Midwest to see what was bubbling. As a result, the snow-globe mentality of the Chicago house scene finally opened up, allowing the scene to see outside of itself - and Mark, meanwhile, was able to see all the way over to the left coast.