Six years later, Happy Colors is one of the most high-energy producers in music. His beats have the velocity of a roller coaster and the giddy incoherence of a gif-filled Tumblr feed. "Deja La Puteria," to pick a recent example, opens with a riff played on Bhangra's single-stringed tumbi instrument, adds a dembow beat, surges into post-footwork 230-bpm double-time, and samples snippets of sound with the crazed energy of someone piling hams into a shopping cart on an old episode of Supermarket Sweep. His is the sound of a digitally connected world on the verge of combustion, like a modem catching fire as it’s overloaded with data. As a DJ, he's brought this manic aesthetic to trendy parties like New York's Que Bajo?! and corporate mega-festivals like EDC Mexico. In February of this year, he signed a deal with Sony Music Latin.

Happy Colors was born with the name Hector Mendoza in Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic, where he and his cousin danced merengue in the streets. "We used to go to people's parties and start dancing, and then the people from the party would pay us pesos and shit, or give us some beer." His dream of starting a merengue boy band ended when he moved to Florida at age 12, but three years later, he started a reggaeton duo—Domiflow y Lender—with a friend from his school bus. Their most-viewed YouTube was a Spanish remix of "Baby" by Justin Bieber.

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In 2010, just before the Four Loko incident, "Sandungueo" by Dominican-Dutch producer Munchi changed his life, showing him that reggaeton and EDM could be spliced into one. A few days later, it would become the first song he played at his debut DJ gig under the name Happy Colors. "Everybody was like 'What the fuck just happened!?'" he tells me. "The promoters were hating, though. They were like, 'This is not reggaeton, blah, blah, blah.' I was like, 'But yo, this shit is tight! It makes people more hyper than reggaeton!''"