DIGITAL SOULS: SAN DIEGO COLLECTIVE

Finding the Human Touch in a Digital World

Inside San Diego's Digital Souls Collective

Jordan Furlong is an artist, producer, and DJ, and the founder of Digital Souls Collective a San Diego based music and arts collective built around dance, dark disco, electronica, and the wider constellation of underground alternative genres. We caught up with him at the collective's two-year anniversary party, right as things were getting loud, and followed up with two of his co-founders, Josh Lake and Tim Sams, to round out the picture.

Digital Souls came together roughly two and a half years ago, when Furlong connected with Sean, Josh, and Amira over a shared love of a specific pocket of electronic music, and a shared frustration that no local space really catered to it.

"We were looking for spaces, collectives, to kind of get plugged into," Furlong told us. "And we saw that it didn't really exist. So we were like, maybe we can try starting our own."

That gap became the collective's founding idea, and eventually its name.

What "Digital Souls" Actually Means

The name isn't just branding it's the collective's whole thesis. Furlong describes electronic music as inherently caught between two forces: the artificial, machine-built nature of the tools, and the very human instinct required to make something out of them feel alive.

"You have to apply your human touch, your human nature, in order for something cool to be made," he said. "We live in this very digital world — everyone's on their phones, everyone's making music with hardware and software — but ultimately, the thing we value the most is that you still have to put your humanity and your own soul into it."

Co-founder Josh Lake puts it more plainly: "Our name embodies the synthesis of human emotion and technology, a reminder that digital creation is simply an extension of our collective humanity."

For Tim Sams, the name also lives in the gear and the waveforms themselves. "We love synths, acid sounds, we love saws and sine waves. These sounds get recorded digitally," he said. "It's connecting the sounds with the art of the individual."

That tension shapes the collective's visual identity too, which leans into retro-futurism, solar punk, early computer technology and vintage video game imagery that, as the scene has matured, has started to feel less like nostalgia and more like a mirror. Furlong describes the goal as almost "de-resolutionizing" that reflection, pulling back to find the line between the human part and the digital part again.

Notably, the vision isn't dystopian. "It's not like the machines are taking over us — we're taking over the machines," Furlong said. "There is a symbiosis. That's the optimistic outcome we'd like to strive for."