About
Steve Zenone
Writer, DJ and producer. Thirty years of standing in rooms where the ceiling drops out on the fourth bar, and a working life spent building technology. This book is what happens when those two habits meet.
I came to electronic music through industrial and goth in the late 1980s.
I was spinning vinyl at industrial clubs around greater Los Angeles, and in 1990 I hosted a weekly Southern California radio show called Cyberphonics, playing electronic music. By the early 90s I was going to the first raves in abandoned LA warehouses and illegal events out in the Mojave desert.
What stayed with me was a curiosity that never went away: where this music came from, how it traveled, who built it up and why it keeps finding new audiences. That's the book. Euphoria Unleashed: The Transformative Power of Trance Music traces Trance from the sequencer records of the 1970s through Frankfurt, Goa and Ibiza to the arenas and the return. I tell it two ways at once: what I lived and watched unfold, and what the historical record can actually support. Where the two diverge, I say so.
Alongside the writing I DJ and produce, and I've spent my career in technology, most of it in security and engineering leadership, which mostly means taking things apart to see how they were built. I ended up researching this book the same way.
I write about music at Zenone Music on Substack, and I'm still in the rooms. There's a chronological playlist that follows the book era by era, and if the book gets something wrong, the corrections page exists for exactly that reason.
If you'd rather start with the shape of the history than the book itself, the eight era timeline lays it out end to end, the glossary explains the vocabulary, and the research notes set out how I decide what the book can actually claim.
Elsewhere