¡WOWZA!
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Nobody move! ¡This is a raid!
¡What a pleasant coincidence! After more than two decades without knowing anything about a good friend of mine who used to be my partner in crime at many of the raves I organized and participated in as a DJ and VJ throughout the 90s, just a few days ago I stumbled across him again in an old Facebook group about the OldSkool Legends of techno in Venezuela. And of course, we started chatting for a while.
This good friend, besides helping me to create and organize a few raves with me back then, in general he usually always took care of recording and videotaping my live performances as a DJ and VJ at most of the raves I participated. Where I was acting in some of them only as a Live DJ and in others only as a VJ in charge of the lively sound-reacting visuals behind the presentation of many international techno figures of the time.
But curiously, and when I had almost lost all hope of recovering the sound recordings and videotape material that was registered at one of the most special Raves in which I participated simultaneously as DJ&VJ on December 31, 1999, and which basically marked the end of my career as a Rave producer & promoter in Venezuela. This good friend gave me the big surprise when he told me that he still had all the recordings from that epic day with him, and everything was still in very good condition.
¡Holy smokes! the truth is that I really wasn't expecting this surprise. Since according to him, this good friend has been traveling the world for the last two decades. And obviously, I find it very surprising that with so much traveling he hasn't lost or misplaced those legendary recordings. But well, I suppose it's because he must have kept them safely stored in his old home in Caracas, at his siblings' house, or maybe somewhere else safe while he was traveling. LoL... Lucky Me!
So anyway, in the end the really important thing here is that, after our short and surprising chat in the Facebook group, we agreed to make an appointment to meet both in person so that he could show me the material I'm talking about and see how much of it he could give me for my own records and enjoyment. Which we did, and for that moment he only could give me a CD copy of the last hour of the four-hour DJ/VJ set I did that night in the DJ booth when we were just minutes away from welcoming the new millennium, the new century, and the new year 2000. The long-awaited and dreaded Y2K.
And I say that this particular rave was special to me, not only because, coincidentally, as far as I can remember, I never organized another rave again. Or because it was a rave with massive attendance where I was in charge of welcoming the Y2K keeping everyone sweating hard and nonstop on the dance floor. But because it was a memorable rave where for the first time I was DJing & VJing at the same time in my own performance. In control of the audio, the video, the visuals and the party madness simultaneously in total synchronization and harmony.
As I have said before on another occasions, in my DJ sets at the time I didn't use records or CDs or other people's music to make people dance and sweat for hours glued to the dance floor. No, I used to mix only my own music live using percussion hardware, beat machines and a few other electronic gadgets from the well-known brand Roland. As well as from Roland was the V-4 videomixer I was using live in my DJ/VJ set that night.
And as for the rest of the insane visuals on giant screens that I had behind me and under my control while making people dance and hallucinate nonstop throughout my presentation before the year 2000, this whole paraphernalia was exquisitely well handled by my PC running a couple of extremely efficient 3D sound-reacting software named DancerDNA and Oozic Reaktor, just in case any of you have heard of them before.
And it is precisely a brief fragment of barely ≈ 9 minutes in duration from that historical DJ/VJ session, when we all were approaching the new millennium, the one which I will share with all of you in this video below. Oh! and last but not least, perhaps there are three other things that are also worth highlighting here:
The surreal images and visuals you will see in this video below are not the ones originally shown on that occasion. In 1999, both DancerDNA and Oozic Reaktor only ran on Windows XP, and this remains the case today. And although I wanted to use these apps again to recreate the audio segment I selected in the video by creating a virtual machine with WinXP, unfortunately they did not install and run correctly. Nonetheless, the visuals I ended up using for the creation of the video you will see below are not far removed from the original ones that everyone enjoyed at the dawn of 2000 in that memorable rave.
As I've also mentioned somewhere before, the music I used to create live as DJ at that time was generally more within what could be called Minimal Techno and HypnoTrance. And which generally had a calmer, more hypnotic and tranquil cadence and rhythm at the beginning that gradually were building beats in crescendo until it suddenly exploded into a quite frenzy atmosphere of authentic wild rhythms in the final half of my DJ sets. However, for this occasion in 1999, and since I was the one in charge of welcoming the millennium and also because most of the attendees were Acid Techno fans, I had no choice but for first time speed up a bit more the BPMs to frankly enter into the realms of Acid to please everyone there.
And lastly, I just want to mention that my good friend told me that in few days he will look out for the tapes on Hi8 with everything that happened at the Y2K event and that he will give me a copy as soon as he finds them. That as he recall, a large part of the original visuals, my live performance and the frenzy stamina and joy with which the attendees danced during my DJ/VJ set that night to welcome the new year, new century, and new millennium are all featured and appears there.
I hope that's the case, and I'll share them with you when the time comes. Meanwhile, I just hope you can settle, feel satisfied and simply enjoy what I have brought you today. Because what you will hear next is how I usually sounded during the hottest, wildest and most intense part of my Live DJ sets and which I have never shared before anywhere. An exclusive for Techno lovers on Hive. And so that my old good friends 
¡Let's Dance!
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