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.
The first time it happened I was too far back in the room to see the booth.
That was the mid 90s. What followed was three decades of records, radio shows, questionable travel decisions and a slowly growing suspicion that nobody had written the book I actually wanted to read about this music. Plenty of nostalgia, plenty of lists, not much that took the sound seriously as both craft and phenomenon.
So I wrote it. Euphoria Unleashed traces Trance from the sequencer records of the 1970s through Frankfurt, Goa and Ibiza to the arenas and the return, and it takes an honest look at what research can and can't tell us about why a build works. Where the science is solid I say so. Where the popular version has outrun the evidence I say that too.
Alongside the writing I DJ and produce, and I've spent my career in technology, most of it in security and engineering leadership. Both jobs are mostly about the same thing: paying attention to structure until you can hear where it's going.
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.
Elsewhere