This is my favorite...
When I was 20, I went to live in a metropolitan cultural hub in Denver (not far from the sixteenth street mall in downtown) and the birthplace of my investment into rave culture (that seems like a misnomer, but I want to provide a candid portrait rather than polished prose...).
When I reached for my first DJ Tron mixtape (RIP Tron...) I had a lot of social pressure in my life. I had run away from home, had been kicked out of my friend's apartment, and was living with my girlfriend at her mom's place.
Out of everything that I listened to (I had heard Technotronic and C+C Music Factory, but had no angle to join rave culture legitimately and almost no exposure to the music) in the record stores there, the outlier seemed to be breakbeats... I didn't think I'd ever be able to dance to breaks, and at the time didn't spend any money on anything breakbeat. I liked 'jungle', and trance for their ethos, and felt like house lent itself to my 'Latino' heritage (I'm half Mexican American and half Caucasian), and wanted to market myself as aligned more with jungle initially, and then listened instead mostly to trance... I remember feeling good about my trance mixtape by Tiesto (I don't remember its name...), and being really excited when Tiesto was on Club Nation America with vocals by Sarah McLachlan.
At some point in the early 2000s, I started listening to DJ Icey, DJ Baby Anne, and Simply Jeff. I bought stuff by Meat Katie and read things about Freq Nasty, but nothing clicked for a long while until about halfway through the "00s" I picked up DJ Icey's "Different Day" on compact disk.
