There are dates you remember because you planned for them to matter. Then there are dates that only become important after enough time has passed. September 9, 1999 was one of those.
Twenty-seven years ago today, I recorded the 9.9.99 mix. At the time, I had no idea I would still be talking about it in 2026. BPM was already two years old by then.
It had started in 1997 at WHSN 89.3 FM in Bangor, Maine, during a completely different era of DJing and electronic music. There was no Twitch, TikTok, YouTube, SoundCloud, or instant worldwide audience sitting on the other side of a screen.
If you wanted people to hear what you were doing, you had to find a way. BPM even found its way onto the internet through RealAudio in 1998, back when hearing a radio station through a computer still felt futuristic.
And DJing itself was different for me.
At WHSN, turntables weren’t part of the setup. I was mixing with CDs, and for a while even that had limitations. When pitch control finally arrived in April 1998 with the Numark CD-7030, suddenly the possibilities opened up.
Beatmatching became part of the language. Mixes became journeys instead of simply records being played one after another. I was learning all of this in real time.
Then came 1999.
That September, I moved across the country to Phoenix.New city.New scene.No real idea where any of it was going. And right in the middle of that transition came 9.9.99.
There wasn’t some huge marketing plan behind the mix. There wasn’t a countdown campaign. There weren’t analytics telling me which tracks people skipped or how many seconds somebody listened before moving on.
You made a mix because you had something you wanted people to hear. Then you put it out into the world. Sometimes that meant a website. Sometimes it meant handing somebody a Mix-Tape or CD. Sometimes it meant one person giving that tape or CD to somebody else.
That was the network. And somehow, the 9.9.99 mix started traveling.
It became one of the first things I did after arriving in Arizona that actually connected with people here. BPM had started thousands of miles away in a college radio studio, but suddenly this little project I had carried across the country was beginning another chapter.
I didn’t recognize that moment for what it was. You almost never do. When you’re young and buried inside the thing you’re creating, there isn’t much time for perspective.
You’re worried about whether the next transition works. You’re hunting for records. You’re dubbing mix-tapes, burning CDs. You’re rebuilding a track order because something doesn’t feel right.
You’re listening to the mix afterward and hearing the one transition you wish you could redo while everyone else tells you they loved it. Then you make another one.
And another. And another.
Years start stacking up. Technology changes. Scenes change. People disappear and occasionally, decades later, somehow reappear.
Formats become obsolete. Websites vanish. Clubs close. Record labels disappear.Tracks you once hunted for weeks can suddenly be found in seconds.
The equipment sitting in front of me today would have looked like science fiction to the version of me who recorded 9.9.99. But here’s the strange part. The process still feels familiar. I still sit there moving tracks around until the story feels right.
I still obsess over keys. I still hear transitions in my head before I try them. I still love the long blend, when one record slowly becomes another and for a few seconds neither track really belongs to itself anymore. I still get excited when I find a record that makes me immediately think: I know exactly where this goes.
Twenty-seven years later, that part hasn’t changed. And maybe that’s why 9.9.99 means more to me now than it ever did then. It represents a point in time when none of this had any guarantee of continuing.
There was no twenty-five-year plan. There certainly wasn’t a thirty-year plan. There was just music. BPM survived because I kept coming back to it.
Sometimes consistently. Sometimes after life pulled me somewhere else for a while. But it never completely went away. And every once in a while, something happens that reminds me that these mixes weren’t only markers in my own life.
Other people were there too. Somebody remembers the track. Somebody remembers the CD. Somebody remembers hearing a mix twenty years ago that I haven’t thought about in years. And suddenly this archive isn’t just a collection of old recordings anymore.
It’s a record of people, places, technology, friendships, scenes, and versions of ourselves that don’t exist anymore. Except, for an hour or two, inside a mix. That is what 9.9.99 has become for me.
A timestamp. A snapshot of where BPM was. A snapshot of where I was. And one small piece of a story that somehow kept going.
September 9, 1999.
September 9, 2026.
Twenty-seven years.
I couldn’t have imagined this back then. I’m glad I kept pressing record. Twenty-seven years later, I’m grateful that I kept the music going.
Built on passion. Driven by sound. Since 1997.
Download the vintage MP3 Here
