When I had started going to raves back in the 90's, the only "online" places were CompuServe, Prodigy, AOL, and if you really knew what you were doing, you would log on to a BBS — a Bulletin Board System. And these were used for chatting with people across the country, and depending on what you logged into, even the world. I remember logging into a BBS one night, and learning of a rave party once. Other than that, the best way to learn of the parties were flyers and word of mouth. And, once you learned of the party, in order to throw off the authorities, there were map-point hotlines. You would call from the first one, find out where the next one was to get to the party. Sometimes it was in a decrepit or dilapidated building or warehouse. These were called Illegal or "Outlaw" raves.
That being said, the DJs, and the music you heard at these events were magical. Now that I'm older, and have amassed quite a nice catalog of tracks from that area in various formats (CD/vinyl/MP3s), I always wanted to play at one of those events from back in the day. But something I quickly learned was how distant the BPMs were for large number of the tracks from that era, and how the speed of almost all of them drifted between a few different BPMs! And back then, there wasn't any sync buttons, or even digital DJ decks to use. It was ALL vinyl! I give credit where credit is due, the DJs back then made it look as simple as tying your shoe, when it was more like trying to knit a quilt from multiple directions.
In this month's mix, I have been able to incorporate some of today's hard techno tracks in a mix withe some classic rave tracks from the like of Acen's "Trip II The Moon" (Parts One And Two), Church Of Extacy's "Passion", and Interactive's "Elevator Up & Down". Each of these tracks, if played for a raver who went to parties in the 1990s will instantly be able to tell you their escapades in which each of these tracks played a part! And to top it all off, I added my own track "Original Raver" to close the set. This unreleased track is my own attempt at writing a 90's rave track, complete with rave whistles! Let me know what you think!
Enjoy!
