In the Summer of 1993 I was promoting an upcoming Rave company called Syrous with an event set for September. How I got to this point is a little crazy considering I had only discovered the Toronto Rave scene a year earlier, but I was hooked after experiencing my first rave I attended. I had a passion for underground raves and was addicted to abandoned warehouses and the sounds of Drum’n Bass music. I wanted to show what my vision was for the Toronto Jungle scene. On September 3rd 1993, at the age of 18, with a little help from my parents and lots of support from the Toronto Rave community, I held my first Rave at Cinespace Film Studios on Eastern Avenue in Toronto. The night was a success but we had some hickups and drama that night. The party was bringing out lots of people, i think we peaked at about 800 people at one point but unfortunately we lost power early on because of some asshole who worked on the Cinespace lot. he was pissed with all the people flooding the place so he pulled the power to the building. I remember calling Nick freaking out (The owner of Cinespace) It wasnt cheap to throw a rave and you relied heavily on sales at the door so people were showing up and there was no music or power so they just left. Nick eventually told the asshole to restore power and i remember going with security to force him to comply. As soon as the power came back, the laser system turned on and you heard all the cheers and whistles from the crowd. It had been turned off for almost 2 hours at that point. The party continued til about 7am the following morning. I remember we had a Spaceball for people to spin around in, Dave’s Smart Drinks and a live Performance by a drum’n bass producer known as 1.8.7 from Pittsburg who flew in for the event. Here’s a recording of his live performance that night. I still have vivid memories of that whole experience. The argon lasers and the insane sound setup by Myron’s Sound System. I ended up loosing about $4000 that night because of the power failure and the lack of ticket sales at the door.

Syrous would return a year later when I partnered with brothers Rob & Vito Lisi. I designed all of the promotional flyers. Initially directing the designs at Candor printing through their resident Graphic Artist, Terry Leung, who was responsible for many fantastic Toronto rave flyers back in the day, including Pleasure Force, Better Days, Atlantis and many others. Eventually I was doing all the computer work myself, building 3D landscapes for my flyers and starting my own Graphic Design service for the Toronto Rave scene. Before throwing raves I was a promoter for Pleasure Force, Destiny and others.

Here are all the flyers I did for Syrous. Many were with the help of Terry at Candor printing.

In the summer of 1994 after the huge success of our 2nd event, Judgment Day, I flew to London, England with Dj’s Sniper & Mystical Influence to promote Syrous and the Toronto Jungle scene. Lukcly I had brought a cheap Kodak camera along for the adventure. We met up with the Lucky Spin Records crew, Slipmaster J and Darren Jay. We attended A.W.O.L at the Paradis Club and got to see Dj Mickey Finn and MC GQ perform live and hung out backstage. We also got a chance to visit Music House where DJ’s and Producers got dubplates pressed. In the pictures below you will see a younger me posing with Dj Nut Nut on the left and Dj Kookoo inside Music House. Rob B from Quayside Records also hooked us up with huge amounts of new Drum’n Bass promos. I returned to Toronto with 2 record bags completely full. What a trip!

When I finally got online, remember this is 1994, the Internet was just becoming available for everyone. I started building my own website, this was geocities days and 56k modems. I still remember the url to my first website http://home.istar.ca/~sigma7 that was my now Dj name, Dj sigma7. Of course I feel into this path, it was always about the music. I loved Jungle & Drum’n Bass. I don’t know how it eventually got to that but I had vivide memories of listening to radio stations like CFNY when they had Chris Sheppards live to air broadcasts or even earlier, the Danny Ellwell show. It started with industrial music like Ministry, then into more electronic like Skinny Puppy and then eventually Trance and then Jungle Techno. Prodigy was a favourite in High School