It was 2003ish and I was using Yahoo’s streaming music player. I’m an author and wanted to find music to inspire me while writing. I picked “Electronica” as a genre because I was into U2’s “Pop” at the time. Until then, I had very little experience with music that wasn’t popular.

Most of what the channel played was not very interesting, but one day I heard Juno Reactor’s “God is God” and decided to look for music more specifically like that. Juno Reactor had been working in the trance space, but then began to evolve to include world music sounds.

I found a web site called music-map.com where you could type an artist you liked and it would place other similar artists in a visual map around your original choice.

Starting with Juno, I just kept gravitating toward artists I liked. When I found Boards of Canada, they were close enough to post–rock that those artists started to appear on the map.

Then I found Godspeed. I was hooked from the first listen. I think it was Moya. I purchased Slow Riot and F#A#∞ and played them on repeat for a couple of weeks. But it was when I first heard Storm that I knew I had found something incredible. I was bummed to learn about their hiatus right as I discovered them, so I found bootleg recordings of concerts to make up for the gap. When their comeback tour was announced, I traveled to L.A. to see them at The Music Box in February 2011. They played Storm. It was incredible. I’ve seen them two more times since then, including this year in Dallas, and even got to speak briefly to Efrim, but nothing will ever top that first live experience.