It’s the mid-1990s in Amsterdam, The Netherlands, where Chinedum Nwosu, a local teenage student, dances at nightclubs in the city. Nwosu dances not only socially, but also professionally, being paid to perform at hardcore, techno, and house music events. While this is only a part time job for her, Nwosu realises the importance of feeling and loving the music to which she is dancing if she is to do it well. When the presiding soundtrack across Amsterdam clubs then gradually changes against her liking, she reasons that she has to stop dancing, given she now isn't wholly engaging the music. Rather than heralding the end of her relationship with electronic music however, this marks a transition in her relationship with such music, as she instead begins djing the forms of it for which she has a passion. Nwosu’s djing then leads to her producing tracks, from which comes her first release, the instant classic, “Dillema”.

It’s 1987 in Wales, United Kingdom and Alexander Coe, who is still in his teens, regularly drives to Manchester from his Bangor home, to go clubbing at the Hacienda nightclub. The scene there revolves around early house music with a mix of other styles, and attracts groups of proficient dancers in trendy clothes who hold dance battles. After then spending a few months away from the club, Coe returns to the Hacienda in early 1988, to find a somewhat different spectacle and sound now in place. Acid house has arrived, full of Day-Glo fluorescent colour, distorted smiley faces, strobe lights, and disordered carnage on the dancefloor. Coe has never seen people behave so freely, and soon becomes obsessed with what only a few weeks prior would have been an alien collection of sounds to him. He soon drops out of school, moves to Manchester, and goes to the club practically every night it is open. This commitment to acid house, and other related forms of electronic music that come after it, motivate him to explore djing, and producing, eventually under the artist title of Sasha, a name that people in his life use to refer to him. Fifteen years or so following this introduction to a new sonic world, Sasha releases the track, "Bloodlock".

It’s the early 1990s, and Anja Schneider, a young German fan of techno music, is seeking out the legendary Tresor nightclub while visiting Berlin. Her life in a small town near Cologne regularly involves attending electronic music parties, however her appetite to explore techno further, partly motivates her journey to Germany’s capital. Schneider duly heads for the Tresor club once she is in Berlin, entering what she believes is the venue, and heading upstairs. There she joins a bustling dancefloor, and hears house, electronica, and hip hop, but not the hard techno beat that she is expecting and desiring. After three to four hours, Schneider suspects accordingly that this venue isn’t the legendary Tresor club about which she has heard so much. When she then politely asks someone else in the club whether she has the right location, he responds that she doesn’t, and taking her by the hand, leads her down a small staircase. Arriving in Tresor’s dark, underground headquarters, Schneider here finds the heart of the Berlin techno sound, which will soon inspire her to not only move here, but also to eventually produce tracks of her own, such as "Belize".

It’s 1994, and Takaaki Itoh, a young Japanese dj with a passion for various forms of electronic music, is beginning to organise his own techno parties in and around the city of Morioka, in northern Japan. Like many people in Japan in the early 1990s, Itoh’s interest in techno has been influenced by artists from the United States and Europe, who tour the country and increasingly release their records there. The growing popularity of techno in Japan is apt, given that so much of the music is made with, and inspired by, devices housing Japanese electronics, in particular those manufactured by the Roland corporation. In the coming years, Itoh’s engagements with techno will expand beyond honouring this music through the parties he organises, to producing his own, soon to be iconic tracks, such as "Needle".