#i listen to the sonic ost two days in a row and all of a sudden i get the urge to draw my sonic ocs and write a fic about unleashed

[monpalace]

dont ever get into a special interest youve since you were a child thats been dormant for more than a decade. ts will ruin your life 😭

[canadian-riddler]

I don’t think I told the story of how I even started listening to EDM so here it is to the best of my recollection (it’s a long post so if you start it make sure you have time lol):

It must’ve been in 2008 or 2009 that I learned it even existed.  Around that time was my first Batman obsession and this was a time before the Internet was really a significant part of my life.  Because that was the year I saw The Dark Knight and I started listening to Hans Zimmer OSTs, which I had to get on CD from the library and sometimes force my old failing CD player to read because if the disc was damaged it just skipped forever.  And this was a time when I had to record CDs down to cassette tapes (all of which I still have) because after two weeks CDs had to be returned to the library.

The first EDM song I probably ever heard - or at least the first one I remember liking - was ‘He’s a Pirate’, the Jack Sparrow remix by Tiesto because it was included as the final track on the Curse of the Black Pearl CD.  And this was before the Internet was available to me, remember, so I had no idea what the song was or if it had a genre or any of that.  And I didn’t have any way of looking for more of it.  I had maybe a couple of cassettes gotten as a book reading prize from a library discard pile, very old MC Mario compilations, but those tapes were more house/underground mixes and the song the cassette was on when I tried to listen to it was, I believe, ‘Higher State of Consciousness‘ by Josh Wink and I was not ready for it yet.  So my only option was to try and find a radio station that played this dance music.  This was before David Guetta brought it into the mainstream, so it was rare to find one.  But I did: Z 103.5 out of Toronto (I lived in Hamilton at the time), which just came in if I positioned the radio dial just so, and on that station I heard Adagio for Strings by Tiesto and Axel F by Street Frog, but that wasn’t even the most important part.  The most important part was that this radio station had a professional DJ who did live mixes every day at five pm.  This DJ, DJ Danny D, would mix two compilation CDs every year for the radio station.  And the library had them.  The first one I listened to was Summer Rush 2005, which I borrowed because it had both Adagio for Strings and Axel F on it.  After that was MC Mario.com Version 2.0 with Benni Benassi’s Satisfaction and California Dreamin’ by DJ Sammy and MC Mario Mixdown 2005 with Sound of San Francisco by Global Deejays and Call on Me by Eric Prydz, and then just any other mix CD the library had that I could borrow (but those two were my favourite ones). 

When I was sent off to high school in about 2011 I discovered the Internet, in the days of BeeMP3 and having to find remixes on forums, but I wasn’t ready for real DJs.  No, I was looking for Sonic the Hedgehog remixes.  I was obsessed with them.  I was burning them on CD to play in my SUV.  I am not kidding.  YouTube downloading wasn’t a thing yet, or at least I barely knew of YouTube’s existence.  There was someone on the Internet called ImmortalImage who had folders of HUNDREDS of dance music songs, which they would post on YouTube in the interest of preservation (though they removed the channel after they posted one thousand songs or something like that) and I downloaded those folders without knowing a single artist in them.  They were called ‘Greatest Electronic Music of All Time’ and some of it truly is the greatest music ever made.

Now, Indy, you might be wondering, where does ARMIN come into all this?  The answer is: eventually.

I didn’t have a phone that could get on the Internet using wifi, not that it was widely available.  I was at Tim Hortons when they first introduced wifi freely available at all their locations, but the only device I had was my PSP and it got stuck on the landing page and never got me through to the Internet.  I got a laptop shortly after, but what really took me to the next step was when I bought an iPod Touch after I accidentally left my iPod Nano on a bus somewhere in Kanata.  iPods had podcasts, and there was a DJ with a podcast by the name of Hardwell who was becoming very popular.  He had a couple friends, Dannic and Dyro, who I liked by association, and I was at work with my laptop when I watched the stream where Hardwell was crowned no.1 DJ in the world during the DJ Mag Top 100.  Hardwell did a mix after the show and this led me to the discovery of EDM festivals.

The first year I heard about Escapade here in Ottawa, it was still in a parking lot and Tiesto was playing but he was the only DJ I knew so I didn’t want to go just for one guy.  The next year, though, Dannic was playing and I only lasted about three hours before going home very tired and very sunburned.  It was an experience I wasn’t sure I wanted to repeat.  But then I ended up on YouTube, on ASOT 600 in Miami.  It was the BEST thing I had EVER heard in my entire life.  Everything else just SUCKED compared to that set.  And the festival was magic.  You could just see that it was magic by watching it.  I didn’t listen to ASOT, not yet; it was only on Spotify and Spotify wasn’t available in Canada, and even when it was I wasn’t inclined to use a website just for one thing.  But the sets on YouTube?  Magic.

And the next Escapade, in 2015, which I had bought a presale ticket for, sent out an email and IIRC it was right around Christmas.  And I was upstairs at work and I was about to go home and when I read it I gasped out loud and sat down on the floor.  Because Armin was headlining the festival, and so was Knife Party, and I had never ever in a million years thought Armin would come to Ottawa because the clubs in Toronto and Montreal were so much better.

The weather was lousy, as it tends to be for Escapade, but it was my mission in life to be in the front row for the entire festival, not so I would be in the pictures (which I was) but so I could see the stage.  The first day I was off to the left side somewhere, but the SECOND day.  The SECOND day I was right in the corner of the L-shaped gate, front and centre and nobody could push me out of the row no matter how hard they tried, and I was there for the entire twelve hours of the festival and it rained half the day and some drunk French guy dumped his beer on my head and tried to blame it on me but when W&W came on it didn’t MATTER.  And when they were finished Armin came on, and it was actually a RELIEF because there had been a rumour that he wasn’t going to show up because it was raining and he KNEW about it and he made fun of it, and you know what they had on the second day?  They had LASERS!  Even though we were near to the airport they had horizontal green lasers and even the security guards were trying to touch them and they looked like they were glittering because of the misty rain.

He played for two of the best hours of my life.  He has a song he made with a Canadian singer and when he played that song he held up the Canadian flag for us and that’s how I knew we really MEANT something to him.  And this was one of the last festivals he wore the Myo armbands for and he was directing the spotlights during Adagio for Strings and he asked if we wanted to hear the story of how he fell in love with trance and it was like everything I had ever wanted had happened all in one hundred twenty minutes and if I had had to lay down my life afterward as payment I would have done so happily.  And when I got home I knew I needed to go to an American festival.  Tomorrowland was too far so it had to be American.  It was between Ultra Miami and EDC Las Vegas and EDC won out because there was just something about a festival that existed only to light up the night and then fade when the sun rose that was magical.  And my first EDC, it was magic.  Everything was perfect.  I got on the livestream for Gaia during my favourite song, how can I EVER top that?  I can’t!  It was the most beautiful place on earth and in some ways, it always will be.  Even last year, which was by all accounts a horrible disaster, I still came away from it with a kandi bracelet and the memory of a time when people were willing to help me when I was completely unable to help myself.

And this year I have EDC in two months and Armin is returning to Ottawa, and I don’t know what they’ll bring.  But it will be something special.  It always is.  I just have to let it happen.