MY ELECTRONIC BAPTISM

The first electronic music I was exposed to was in the mid-nineties, when I was 14, during a family dinner in Northbridge (the clubbing epicentre of Perth, Western Australia). We were sitting outside a Turkish restaurant opposite a club called The Church (now known as The Library). The driving bass coming from there that night, quite literally, shook my soul. The 4/4 was intoxicating and pounded out relentlessly as we scoffed down our hummus and kebabs.

“What kind of music is that, Dad?”

“I don’t know, but I’ve heard it on the radio late at night.”

On our drive home, we tuned in to RTR, the community station he was talking about, but sadly, they were playing reggae. So for the next week, I jumped on the boom box in my room until I got home from school one day and came across a show Full Frequency. Bingo! It sounded the same so I quickly jammed a cassette into the deck and hit record. The presenter called the music Techno, and for the next 45 minutes, he spun up vinyl after vinyl of underground bangers. I’d died and gone to heaven.

My religion was born. Every day, between 3-5 pm, I would tune in, hit record and bop out in my room while I “studied”. I sank my pocket money into blank JVC tapes so I could record the wonderful sounds that drummed down the wireless. Each episode showcased a different genre, from DnB to Trance to House to Disco and even the odd bit of Acid Jazz and Soul.

I don’t remember too many of the songs from those early days though one that refuses to leave my head is Orlando Voorn’s ‘Paco Di Bango’s World’. It was the first record I bought almost a decade later when I discovered Discogs, and I still have it to this day.

As high school ended, dance music was all I jammed to. I ran mIRC (the program that preceded Napster and Limewire) day and night, meticulously downloading every House, Techno and DnB track I could find, one song at a time, over an internet connection that would take around half an hour to pull down a single 3Mb MP3. I would then meticulously catalogue them into a collection that I still proudly listen to today.

The day of my first paycheck in early 2000, I splurged on an expensive Sony stereo system for my car before realising I had no CDs to play on it. So I convinced my folks to fork out for a CD-R unit (very rare and expensive at the time) and I went to work burning mountains of CDs. The freedom that came with that car and the expression from the music, shaped my early adulthood.

It was during these days that I discovered the Wild albums, which were the first dance music compilations to hit the big CD stores in Australia. They were loaded with everything from Paul Oakenfold and Van Dyk to Madison Avenue and The Vengaboys (don’t laugh).

From there, I graduated to the more expensive but infinitely more worldly Ministry Of Sound compilations, namely the Annuals and the Chill Out Sessions. This coupled with a DVD I got from my old man, Visions Of Ibiza by Chris Coco, suddenly got me thinking, there must be others out in the world like me.

And of course, there was, but it wasn’t until I ventured out of my circle of friends and discovered summer festivals with my best friend Liz, that I saw just how big the scene was.

In 2001, I flew to London for New Year’s Eve with my other best mate Adam to dance at the biggest dance festival in England, Ministry of Sound’s ‘Odyssey’ (still my favourite party to this day).

This was the scene of my first foray into pills and it changed me forever. The euphoric feeling and sudden confidence was addictive, the night was unbelievably smashing and the time had was out of this world. I needed more!

So, upon returning to Perth, I carried on in both the drug scene and dance music scene with Liz. Over the next eight years, we would go to countless events together, get wrecked and bliss out to the best music on the planet. After-parties came thick and fast, which is where I got my first exposure to DJs.

Unfortunately, the idea of it didn’t click with me, and the closest I came was buying a few lonely House records from Discogs.

After that, I got in the family way, my musical interests broadened, and electronic music became just a small subset of what I listened to.

All this changed again in 2018 when I decided to treat myself to a pair of Sony WH-1000XM3’s wireless noise-cancelling headphones. They are audiophile heaven, and I strongly recommend a pair if you are serious about music. The unintended effect of those bad boys was that suddenly my head was being filled with that same driving bass that had got me hooked 20 years ago.

This led me to go hunting for Electronica again. For a while, I felt ashamed at how I’d let the genre slip out of my life, though this was quickly replaced by the elation of discovering live DJ sets of the guys I used to listen to on the dance floor. Amongst the first sets I came across was Hot Since 82’s, Eastern Electric 2017 set and Carl Cox’s Defected Virtual Festival, Live From Melbourne set.

I couldn’t stop listening to them, watching them dance and groove, having the crowd at their command and being painfully cool. Yep, you guessed it; the inevitable happened, I wanted to become a DJ.

Thankfully, my youngest brother Michael had spent many years mixing DnB and still had a full arsenal of gear sitting in his wardrobe. He was keen to show me the ropes and let me use his equipment. Voila, I was a DJ! Albeit one with absolutely no idea what was going on. So I set about learning from him and the many masters on YouTube.

Life was full of colour again, and I had an amazing new hobby to get stuck into. But more than that, I’d discovered where my place in music was. It felt right, it felt beautiful, like it was meant to be. My brother and I bonded over many high nights dancing about in my living room with his KRK’s cranked.

A little over a year later, I posted my first set to YouTube (you can listen to that here).

My ride into Electronic Music has been amazingly fulfilling. I owe it so much, it has given me so many wonderful friends and unforgettable experiences which is why I wanted to give back.

I spent a lot of time thinking about how I could do my bit for the community, more than just building my own presence. I wanted to create a road map for all those just like me that loved music but didn’t know where their place was in the scene. Enter MIDNIGHT ELECTRONICA.

So PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE make good use of the resources on this site and come back often. Let’s grow together and build a wonderful community. The beauty of dance music is that it unites us all. And I couldn’t be prouder to be a part of it.

Big love!

David