DJ Sy’s a bit of an enigma. I love his early sets – some of the rave tapes from 92-93 are easily some of the best live recordings of the hardcore era out there; clattering, explosive walls of noise that see Sy cutting through tracks at an insane speed, scratching with the skill of a kid who’s grown up obsessing over hip hop. Even when the mixes teeter on the edge of disaster, the chopping between tracks turning into a brutal, disruptive assault, it’s all done with such supreme confidence that Sy comes out winning. At his best, you get a sense that he’s attained some pure zen state, almost vanishing within his own mix, riding across a tumultuous sea of sound, elevating to rave heaven. Better still, as Sy was playing multiple gigs every weekend during this period, there’s more than enough tapes of him out there smashing it out to present a vast stand-alone catalogue of golden age Sy. But, if I'm honest I just can’t get on with the direction he took when the scene split into jungle/ hardcore camps around 94-95. Sy pursued the increasingly frantic happy and trancecore sounds – loads of pop vocals, nothing but 4/4 beats, and, for me, a narrowing of his horizons. Financially it definitely worked out for him, and I’m not here to judge anyone else’s taste, but I personally I wish I’d got to hear what he could have done if he’d chosen to carry on mixing up the hardcore with the jungle. As he’s playing the upcoming Moondance festival, it seemed a good opp to find out about the roots of his sound, why he switched to a pure happy route, and what’s it like to be knocking on 50 and still rinsing happy hardcore.