Teenage...Wasteland? I think not.

Circa 13 years old, my parents and I moved away from the neighborhood in which I grew up and I made new friends in my new junior high (and soon, high school). There was no fanaticism among music in these new "cliques." I was left wanting, fending for myself. It was at this time I met some people that had a slight inclination towards electronic music. In my head (circa 2000), "electronica" was a road that ended a few years prior with the supposed death of the rave scene (not that I knew the reason behind it, but this was). I just didn't really hear anything new about it for ~2-3 years and figured it was like a disco resurgance gone horribly wrong.

These rapscallion friends of mine started me in on trance.

-Tiesto
-Paul van Dyk
-Oakenfold.

You know the lineup. It was something genuinely new to me. Again, I ate it up. As I started doing bit by bit research on the internet for popular electronic music, I came across something my friends haven't found, but I really enjoyed. The holy trinity of my teenage years:

-Aphex Twin
-Squarepusher
-Autechre

So there I am, between the ages of ~14-16 I'm trying to get my hands on as much electronic music as I possibly can. Mind you again, this is circa 2000, the year that often times marks the death of the culture that Electronic Dance Music belonged to (the rave scene), so I had a lot of catching up to do on the years that I had been missing out. Over the next ~4 years this catching up included stuff like: Aphex Twin classics, Orbital, Astral Projection, DJ Icey, (more) PVD, (more) Oakenfold, and tonnes of others. This was an entire world I had never seen or really heard of all at my fingertips because of the internet.