One of those arrivals was Damian Higgins, a Carnegie-Mellon student who’d trekked four hours to D.C. from Pittsburgh in a caravan with friends; at one point, he was pulled over by the cops while going 81 miles an hour and got a ticket for $156. Somehow, in the pre-GPS and cellphone era, he found his friends: “Pure luck,” he says. Higgins had been a synthpop and industrial fan before encountering T99’s “Anasthasia,” a frantic Belgian track that mangled a Barry White orchestral sample till it blared like a distorto guitar, at a Front 242 show. He’d purchased it on an expensive English import CD compilation, even though he didn’t own a CD player. “I felt if I didn’t buy it then, I’d never see it again,” he says. Higgins began scouring English magazines for more information: “There really wasn’t much going on in Pittsburgh at the time,” he says. But as Dieselboy, the moniker he still uses, he began spinning Sundays at the Metropole. “It went from being a couple hundred to 1,500 people in a year,” he says.