First post! I think for my first post an origin story is in order.
The pic is from the very first electronic music CD I bought. It's Prodigy's first album, Experience, released in 1992. In 1993 I was on a school trip to New York City. At one point we went to a Tower Records. CDs were still fairly new and were sold in those absurdly long boxes and still relatively expensive. This was before the internet and at that point in time where it was still fairly difficult to even know what any CD actually sounded like. At this point, electronic music was new to me. Music for me was dominated by what you heard on the radio, on MTV, maybe in movies on soundtracks, or what you could buy from the store at the mall or the local independent record shop if your town had one. I'd heard about this crazy new electronic music. It was an exotic and distant thing that I actually knew nothing about. At the Tower Records, I came across this Prodigy CD and recognized the name from rave flyers I'd seen in records shops. I knew this was part of that exotic, new, distant thing and had to know more.
This particular Tower Records in New York had something novel and super-futuristic for the time. It was a kiosk that you could take any unopened CD long box and scan the barcode, and listen to previews of the music on the disc. Quite the accomplishment for the time. I took the Prodigy CD up to it, scanned the barcode, listened to maybe 15 seconds of it. It was electric. I was struck. I knew instantly I had to buy it, and I did. I did whatever I had to do on that day on that dumb trip until finally the day ended with me in bed in bed in some dumb hotel. I popped the CD into my Sony Discman and listened to the whole thing. I listened to the whole thing, start to finish, three times in a row.
The world that high-school age me lived in, in 1993, was a particular moment. I was old enough to remember time when we had no VCRs, no Nintendo, no cable TV. I remember the old video game arcades and all their unique aesthetic pageantry. At the time I injested a lot of OMNI magazine, 2001:Space Odyssey, the novel + movie, everything by William Gibson, the original Tron movie, Predator, Terminator, and Aliens, Commodore 64's and IBM PCs with diskette drives and no hard drive, Nintendos and Super Nintendos. I was old enough to see how computers were taking over, getting better, faster, more connected. I was on dial-up BBSs, Compuserve, and AOL and everyone knew this internet thing was going to become a big thing. It was a cliche but also something real that 'computers in more people's hands will change the world.'
So standing there in that Tower Records and then listening with the Discman later that night, the sound I heard was absolutely captivating. It's hard to describe what a jolt it was to hear for the first time, and how completely different it was from anything else I'd ever heard. It was like hearing, distilled and concentrated into musical form, everything that was exciting about technology, outer space, sci-fi, the future, electronics, robots, all mixed with the excitement and energy of something dangerous and rebellious and underground. I instantly knew would never stop listening to this. (Plenty of people got into the music because of all I described, plus drugs. I sidestepped the drugs.)
30+ years later, I'm still at it. I've spent plenty of time listening to other types of music, which I love and appreciate. However, that day began the process of locking in my affection for electronic music that would only grow and deepen over time.