It's an easy answer if you were there at the time: in an era where the World Wide Web was coming to the forefront of everyday life and the younger generation would grow up knowing no world without technology, Mortal Kombat & Hackers weren't just the soundtracks to those movies. They were the fundamental orchestration to a cyberpunk lifestyle for mostly young, rebellious males who nonetheless sought safety out of self-accomplishment in virtual spaces.
I was among them, and I wistfully recall how Orbital's "Halcyon + On + On" was like the mutual glue that connected those 2 seminal albums. A one-of-a-kind track with backwards-riffed vocals originally sung by Kirsty Hawkshaw on "Fine Day", then resampled for the atmospheric, dreamy, and somewhat unsettling dancescapes of the Brothers Hartnoll.
To this day, "Fine Day" remixes continue to be raved about/to by many, including a 2008 remake by Kirsty vs. Kinky Roland. While the renegade days of soundsystems threatening to blow apart illicit warehouse activities are but a memory, I'll note that Kirsty later found her way into leading virtual world Second Life (who I was inspired to work for after seeds were planted having Mortal Kombat & Hackers many times on repeat). As helpfully explained on Wikipedia. I've not yet met her inworld, but I welcome having an organic encounter.
Today, I was revisited by the stabbing grooves of Mortal Kombat & Hackers when I noticed that Psykosonik's canon is on the iTunes Store. Both Psykosonik albums, the eponymous first and sophomore Unlearn, mean little if you don't have memories associated with them. But I used to visit their Bitstream home page obsessively. This was an age before MP3s were popular, Flash wasn't the rich media juggernaut it is today, and even downloading a single song was an inconvenient pain… but for great music, how it was worth the trouble! It could take a rather long time on a 28.8k modem, or even a 56k if you were lucky. (The reception in my area was noisy, and I could often only get through at 40k. The harsh dialtone sequence became like a mantra, and staying online without keeping track of my usage hours, or even minutes, was but a promise of time that had to catch up.)
I know this isn't the first time I've reminisced, but like that Voyager ep, Shattered, I feel like Chakotay, different parts of me fragmented across the timeline. I think of when I used to listen to those soundtracks and get inspired by the electronic sounds inside, and on my first "pro" synth, start to emulate, take my baby steps in constructing my own sounds. Over a decade later, here I am, taking some new baby steps with today's modern tools… another generation in itself.
I feel better being able to talk about, to share this, and explain some of my roots and what's influenced me. Because the next steps are coming in 2009, and I can already tell it's going to be a wild ride.