How did you get into electronic music?

I never had anybody around me who listened to electronic music, so it's something that I very much found for myself. My dad was always into rock/blues/guitars, but I never liked it at all and just didn't pay any attention to music until I eventually heard something that resonated.

It started when I was on holiday somewhere in Europe in the early-mid nineties and probably about eight, and I kept hearing Robert Miles - Children around the pool. I can remember thinking it must be a remix of the x-files theme (!?) and going into HMV (a now defunct highstreet CD/record retailer), and asking somebody who worked there if they knew what it was... and walking out with a copy of the actual x-files theme. So that put things on hold for a while, because that definitely wasn't what I was after.

When I was about 11/12 I kept hearing trance CD's advertised on TV, and there were three tracks that I instantly fell in love with, but I didn't know what they were. I had them in my head for a long time and was determined to find the name of each one of them. They were:

Planet Perfecto - Not Over Yet (Matt Darey Remix)
Signum - Coming On Strong
CRW - I Feel Love

I remember hearing CRW - I Feel Love blasting out of a tinny speaker at a computer show, and the guy on the stall correctly ID'd it for me. One of the others was ID'd by a guy in HMV going off very little information.

When I was about 13/14 I managed to download and play my first mp3 from a website. Then came Napster, which shut down within a few weeks of me finding it. The real fun started when AudioGalaxy came out, and I really got into trance. My friends started getting into it via me.

I was doing a school project on drugs and had to do a presentation on the dangers on ecstasy, and had a moment of revelation when reading the junk propaganda saying how dangerous MDMA was, whilst at the same time citing a very small contradictory number of people who had died from it as evidence (in very stark contrast to alcohol, I noticed).

I announced to my friends that I was going to take ecstasy and start going to trance clubs. They agreed, and when we were sixteen and had just finished our GCSE's we did exactly that. That was back in September 2002 when I had my first pills at a Godskitchen arena event. Then I started going to Foundation which was the local club for underground electronic music. I started reading bluelight, joined up a few months later, and now, here I am.

Happy to announce that I became fully obsessed with electronic music, and still am today. :)
 
for me it all started in 97 in my uncle's old honda CRX. i was 7 years old . he was playing the prodidy fat of the land album all the time because i liked it so much .
then my step father was working for a bus company and one day he brought me a case of cd's full of electronic music that he found in the lost in found section ( most of it i dont remember to this day cause i was 9 years old) but what i can remember vividly is this infected mushroom album inside that case. i used to listen to it constantly.

Then for the rest of my teenage years i kinda gave up on that cause i formed my first band in highschool and became kind of snobby towards it (electronic music is just pressing buttons) just to follow the rest of my friends opinions on the genre. Then came my 16th birthday, an ecstacy pill and Benny bennasi. i fell back in love with the genre .

A little bit later, my girlfriend at the time brought me to an even in a loft somewhere in Montreal , the guy there used to throw underground party every weekend , with happy hardcore, hardstyle , and psytrance. lets just say i completely when crazy with psytrance music. Especialy full on .

I went all in and bought my first pair of Pioneer Cdj 200 , and cost me an arm and a leg .
To this day im still pretty active in festivals and parties based in Quebec, Canada .

All thanks to my uncle . i owe him everything.
 
I got invited to a rave in 2005. Trance/electro and a pill, and I enjoyed a lot my night. Started going to happy hardcore events and psytrances parties/festivals. I'm not going out anymore, but I still enjoy a lot hardcore and hardstyle, with still an appreciation for psytrance.
 
for me it all started in 97 in my uncle's old honda CRX. i was 7 years old . he was playing the prodidy fat of the land album all the time because i liked it so much .
then my step father was working for a bus company and one day he brought me a case of cd's full of electronic music that he found in the lost in found section ( most of it i dont remember to this day cause i was 9 years old) but what i can remember vividly is this infected mushroom album inside that case. i used to listen to it constantly.

Then for the rest of my teenage years i kinda gave up on that cause i formed my first band in highschool and became kind of snobby towards it (electronic music is just pressing buttons) just to follow the rest of my friends opinions on the genre. Then came my 16th birthday, an ecstacy pill and Benny bennasi. i fell back in love with the genre .

A little bit later, my girlfriend at the time brought me to an even in a loft somewhere in Montreal , the guy there used to throw underground party every weekend , with happy hardcore, hardstyle , and psytrance. lets just say i completely when crazy with psytrance music. Especialy full on .

I went all in and bought my first pair of Pioneer Cdj 200 , and cost me an arm and a leg .
To this day im still pretty active in festivals and parties based in Quebec, Canada .

All thanks to my uncle . i owe him everything.

Can I know your DJ name? I was active in the Quebec scene in the 2005-06 era. I was also member of ravezone.
 
I first got into electronic music when grime became big.

I went to see skepta when he played at one of the clubs in Southampton and did half a gram of mdma and had a fucking sick night.

Later I saw that pendulum, a dnb Group were playing at the same venue and I remembered listening to some of their stuff as a kid so went with some mates, had one of my pills confiscated by a bouncer but I was already mangled by that point and didn’t get kicked out so it was all calm.

I then got into other electronic underground genres e.g. bassline, oldschool jungle, ukg, House, techno etc through raves, festivals etc where I’d discover new stuff as well as listening to people I already knew.
 
My first exposure to electronic music was through my cousin who liked hard house. I guess she was aware of the Los Angeles rebel house scene in the 90s. I liked it for a bit, but I wasnt really into it. It wasn't reality till I was noticing that I started to like the style of house that Mark farina spun.
 
Ever since I can remember I’ve enjoyed electronic music, I feel like my favourite sub-genre (sort of speak) would be nintendocore/chiptune, since I would sit around my cousins that played videogames (even though videogames never really interested me) just to listen to the jams. I started to get more into it in my late High School Years (~2009) when bands like Crystal Castles, and You Love Her Coz She’s Dead where getting a lot of attention.

Like OP mentioned it is blood boiling to hear people say “oh so techno” or “you mean like club music?”

The bands that I listen to mostly are Data, Alice Glass, The Drunkers, Unicorn Kid, You Love Her Coz She’s Dead, Kap Bambino, Zedd, Shirobon, Belzebass etc
 
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I'd always liked what I heard of electronic music as a whole, but what really got me into dance music and kicked it off big was finding the Top 100 Trance and Techno Songs of All Time torrent, that's been around for forever, on isoHunt back in probably 2008-2009? I listened to my playlist of favorites from that collection soooo many times. To the point that it'd actually put me to sleep I knew it so well, which is crazy to me now looking back. From there I got into Tiesto from a friend at school that liked trance, and so on and so forth. Took me quite a while to find the holy grail of house music, though.
 
Late 90's a friend showed me his $1600 sampler and an Amiga 500 with a music program. We added my trumpet to the music and bang I was learning the ropes from him. Logical Progression, Carl Cox, Rotterdam... I love my setup these days.
 
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