I have been involved in electronic music for more than twenty years, which is long enough to have watched several futures arrive, become ordinary, and then become nostalgic.
I started with an online radio station in the ’90s, when broadcasting music over the internet still felt like a strange experiment. Finding electronic music required intention. You followed obscure links, traded recommendations, ordered records you had never heard and paid attention when someone whose taste you trusted mentioned a name.
In the early 2000s, I produced IDM and jungle as The Square Root of Evil. I was drawn to music that was intricate, playful and slightly damaged around the edges—music with a sense of internal logic that didn’t need to reveal itself immediately. I put out CDs, played live and found communities built around sounds that were still relatively small and unruly.
Later, I moved toward ambient music. Eventually, four-on-the-floor rhythms began making sense to me in a way they hadn’t before. The 303s helped.
None of these changes felt like abandoning one identity for another. They felt more like discovering that the same curiosity could take different forms. Jungle, IDM, ambient, techno and house may create very different rooms, but I am listening for similar things inside them: texture, tension, surprise, emotional intelligence and a little bit of mischief.
After decades in music, I am less interested in proving that my taste is correct.
I only want to play music I love.
That sounds obvious, but it can be surprisingly easy to lose. DJs are surrounded by signals telling us what we should be playing: what is new, what is credible, what is filling particular dancefloors, what the algorithm is rewarding and what might lead to the next booking. Paying attention to the world is part of the work, but so is recognizing when attention becomes obedience.
The longer I do this, the more I trust the physical response I have to a piece of music. Sometimes that response is intellectual—the pleasure of hearing a producer solve a rhythmic problem in a way I didn’t expect. Sometimes it is emotional. Sometimes it is simply the immediate knowledge that I want to hear this very loudly in a room full of people.
I have also learned that dancefloors don’t need to be underestimated. People can handle strange transitions, unfamiliar structures and moments that ask them to listen differently. A set can be generous without being predictable. It can appeal to the brain and the body at the same time.
That has always been the goal.
The technology has changed enormously. Music is easier to make, release, find and carry. Entire collections now fit inside devices smaller than the record bags we used to drag through airports. That accessibility is extraordinary, even if abundance brings its own problems. When everything is available, selection becomes less about access and more about attention.
What hasn’t changed is the electricity of discovering something that rearranges your understanding of what music can do. It can happen in a record shop, on a dancefloor, inside a mix, through a friend’s message or while following some improbable path online at two in the morning.
The scene changes too. Venues disappear. Promoters burn out. New generations arrive and build their own rooms, often with different language for impulses that feel familiar. There are cycles of expansion and retreat, and recurring predictions that nightlife, underground music or meaningful community are finished.
They are never finished. They just move.
Being around for decades doesn’t mean standing outside those changes and judging them. At its best, longevity means retaining your history without asking the present to reproduce it. It means knowing what came before, remaining curious about what is happening now and making space for what you don’t understand yet.
I don’t want to preserve electronic music in amber. I want to remain surprised by it.
When I play now, all of those earlier versions of me are still present: the person running an online radio station, the producer programming intricate beats, the ambient listener, the techno DJ and the person discovering that a warm house record can open a room in exactly the right way.
The decades haven’t narrowed my taste. They have made its connective tissue clearer.
I’m still following the signal. I’m simply more certain now about which signals are mine.