www. djdieselboy. com

The music blazes like a luminous lightcycle purchased at a Tron garage sale. The speakers fire out circles of tight spirograph synthesizers, quick stabs of digital noise, intestine-shaking low-end quakes and nonstop cyborg drum rattles. And behind the DJ's tables: a babyfaced 28-year-old named Dieselboy.

"I usually veer towards two types of sounds--aggressive and deep," explains the Philly kid. "A grinding heavy-metal bassline will usually grab me as much as a beautiful deep keyboard riff."

Weird thing is, Dieselboy's journeys into Tomorrowland, all synthetic spasm and shudder, are not what you might expect from his history.

Dieselboy was born Damian Higgins, son of tropical balladeer Bertie Higgins, the man behind the early-'80s soft-focus romantic classic "Key Largo." That biological legacy and an early youth spent in dirtclump nowheresvilles like midget-sized cowboy town Rye, Colo. (pop. 168) and burned-out Rust Belt burg Oil City, Penn. (pop. 11,949) don't add up to the ideal bio for the country's most famous sci-fi jungle master.

"I think my early years in small towns were probably a detriment to my musical pursuits," he says. "When I really began hunting down music in high school it was very difficult to find new material. I was rarely exposed to underground music...there was absolutely no punk-rock scene in my high-school hometown, and there were maybe two people who listened to bands like the Cure and Depeche Mode. I was chomping at the bit to get my hands on new tunes."

A move south to Pittsburgh offered access not only to better records but to a fledgling techno scene as well. In '97, Dieselboy flew the coop for Philadelphia, where he could better spread his wings. From there he launched increasingly popular DJ mix albums that showcased his taste for storming, industrial-strength rhythmics.

Monster rave label Moonshine then signed him on for two DJ mix albums (A Soldier's Story and System Upgrade), gifting Dieselboy with near-global reverence. Many call him America's best drum & bass DJ; the rest of the world rings him ceaselessly for gigs.

The planet-hopping DJ. The superstar mixmaster. The perfect life? Sorta.

"I love DJing, I love meeting new people, I love visiting new locales," he says. (But...?) "But ask any frequent flier if they like living out of a suitcase and you'll hear a resounding 'No.' I'm home maybe one or two days a week tops, and it really limits time I can spend with my close friends and my girlfriend. And though the money is good, it sometimes seems so wasteful to fly hours and hours to some city, get situated in a hotel room, and then DJ for 90 minutes only to turn around and fly back home again. It just seems a bit silly."

Trouble in paradise, then?

"Hey, I wouldn't change it for the world. I love my job!"

Ask any raver, though, and you'll find there are, indeed, troubles to be found. Paramount among them: The Man. As techno's popularity in the U.S. surges to catch up with Europe, the guardians of morality are suddenly training their icy eyes on this once-underground scene. Widespread musical exposure, good. Excessive police attention, bad.

Dieselboy's take: "The unfortunate thing is that all of this exposure is giving American media a field day in sensationalistic news reporting. It's due to this intense negative media exposure that the government and local law enforcement have been cracking down on promoters and parties the past few years. I'm fearful for the future of the rave scene in America."

Ironically, this tightening chokehold seems to suit Dieselboy's dense, semi-oppressive mixes. The squirming, mechanical sounds call up paranoid images of police shocktroops as much as any rave utopia--or the beach dreams of his father's music, for that matter.

"My father's musical stylings land him squarely in the world of Jimmy Buffett and adult contemporary 'island music,'" he notes, "far from drum & bass and other kinds of music I get inspiration from. I don't really think that his music and my music really go well together. I've actually joked with him about remixing 'Key Largo.' But in all seriousness I don't think I could get it to work. Sorry, Dad!"