GOK TEZGOR

I grew up in the South Side of Chicago, and my first memories of house music was in the early 80s having Chicago radio DJ Bad Boy Bill play one of our school dances...HOUSE MUSIC all night long. Okay, till 10pm and with chaperons. When I went off to college I started defining my musical tastes to combine Industrial, and a generous smattering of Punk. Then in the early 90s, after one of my couple-of-hundred-people-plus house parties got raided by the police, a person that heard about my party reputation approached me to help him organize a party for a bunch of architects and designers. Thus my first Rave in 1991 was born.

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In the 3 years I worked closely with the Rave scene in the Midwest, I worked closely with promoters and DJs in Detroit (the birthplace of Techno). My parties brought down talent from Detroit to Muncie, Indiana (which actually became a spot on the map for Raves in the early 90s). Artists like Richie Hawtin, Paris (now of the Detroit Grand Pubas), and Mike Huckaby to name a few. At this point I also traveled around the Midwest to a wide variety of parties watching the birth of numerous techno and house Godfathers such as Richie Hawtin, Jeff Mills, Derrick May, Derrick Carter and Juan Atkins grow. It was truly an amazing time for electronic music.

In 1993 I moved to Cyprus and brought my music along with my and tried to introduce a very virgin crowd of people to electronic dance music. This was at a time when dance music was at its VERY fledgling stages in Cyprus and especially Turkey. I promoted a few parties here and there, and did not graduate from promoting to actually DJing when the hotel that I worked at fired their DJ for their 1000 person plus lavish club. So it was baptism by fire for me, I had to learn to mix...and I did it. The rest is history. Since about 1995 I've been DJing regularly, and especially after moving to New York in 2004, I actively promoted and DJed parties. The list of venues and parties are long - most of them I don't remember, some of them don't exist anymore, but nonetheless the memories of the music and the crowds still resonate in many peoples minds.