BT

An early denizen of the ‘90s progressive-house underground, BT eventually expanded his footprint to cover breakbeat trance, alt-rock, ambient, film soundtracks, and software development. In the process, he helped pave the way for the pop-dance fusions that would be so crucial to EDM’s growth in the late 2000s and 2010s. Born Brian Transeau in Rockville, Maryland, in 1971, BT was a classical prodigy as a child and briefly attended Berklee College of Music, but after discovering the nascent progressive-house scene in the mid-’90s, he got his start on Deep Dish’s eponymous label before signing to Paul Oakenfold’s Perfecto. His 1996 Tori Amos collaboration, “Blue Skies,” helped kick off a growing trend in dance crossovers. In 2000, with Movement In Still Life he leaned into his hybrid approach, mixing up trance and big-beat anthems with downtempo ballads and cameos from turntablist Peanut Butter Wolf and Soul Coughing’s Mike Doughty. His subsequent productions for *NSYNC and Britney Spears helped bring dance music into mainstream pop, while his work for films like 1999’s Go and 2001’s The Fast and the Furious helped remake Hollywood soundtracks in EDM’s image. Over the years, he’s kept experimenting: His group, All Hail The Silence, is a tribute to classic synth-pop, while his 2017 album, _+, shows off his own software designs—commercially available plug-ins like Stutter Edit, Phobos, and BreakTweaker—in the context of silvery ambient and IDM.