Welcome to Part 9 of my “100 Favorite Albums of the 1990’s” list! This part covers the fall of '97 through the summer of '98 - encompassing the entirety of my freshman year of college and most of the summer thereafter. By this point in time, electronic music and rave culture had totally captured my heart and imagination. I'd been a little too young or too isolated to experience grunge and hip-hop's golden age firsthand, so, for the first time, it seemed I was experiencing and participating in a musical revolution in real time. Electronic subgenres like techno, house, trance, IDM, big beat, and trip-hop were in my rotation, but jungle and drum & bass took precedence. Jungle and its immediate stylistic descendant drum & bass (though both subgenre terms often were and still are used interchangeably) had bubbled up from the UK underground and, with only syncopated breakbeats in a 160-174 bpm range forming its connective tissue, styles and moods within the ...
My life in music. . . .