on Discovering Electronic Dance Music

I think the first really 'electronic' record that caught my attention was a remix of Everything but the Girl's 'Missing'. It's really more of a pop song, but the traces of house were enough to send me looking for more.In the mid-90s, I found a compilation of dance tracks on a CD that I would spin up while playing video games, a digital soundscape to match the virtual experience of driving a pixelated car through an imaginary city.EDM didn't feel like my main genre, never one that I could come to instinctively  any time I wanted to hear a tune, but it carved out a space in my stereo that I needed to visit from time to time.When Underworld's 'Born Slippy' was featured in the closing scene of the Trainspotting film, I felt like I had discovered something amazing - a transcendent experience, an auditory escape that seemed otherworldly, a purely imaginative space to explore.Dieselboy's 'A Soldier's Story' and Juno Reactor's 'Bible of Dreams' were random grabs that sunk deep into my rotation, somehow persisting amidst all the angsty punk that made up most of my collection.I found myself at the end of a day-long concert festival, at 16 years old, completely spent from having seen dozens of bands, now lost in a trance as the Crystal Method blew the figurative roof from RFK stadium, 'Busy Child' syncing tens of thousands into a collective pulse under an open night sky.Around this time, the genre seemed to be growing in popularity, Fatboy Slim was all over MTV, along with Crystal Method, Chemical Brothers, Prodigy and the like. The exposure prompted me to dig deeper and find more complex, fascinating artists who didn't fall into the mainstream.The latest explosion of the genre has been Dubstep, which to me, sounds like a digital interpretation of some of the hardcore bands of the late 90s (Strife, Earth Crisis, Sick of It All) - all that energy, reshaped and packaged for an entirely different (less angry) experience.I did some digital composing of my own when I had some down-time in college, fumbling around with FLStudio and ignoring my guitar. The results were fun, but I never knew what to do with them. How do DJs go from having a few .wav files to throwing parties, anyway?Over the years EDM has remained in the background for me, not the sound I'm most likely to play on a road trip, but always stashed away just in case. If I look at my listening statistics on last.fm, only two EDM acts fall in my Top 20 most-listened over the past several years.EDM's smaller, less prominent place in my listening habits could mean I find other genres more consistently in tune with my moods - or it could mean that those small doses carry such a potent experience, that I only need to dip into them once in a while to get my fill.Maybe the most powerful experiences aren't also the most common - for life in general, or for deciding what to carry in my headphones.