Boris Brejcha invented the genre he plays. High-Tech Minimal, the term he coined in 2012 for his own blend of minimal techno and trance, didn't exist as a category before he named it. He was born in Ludwigshafen, Germany in 1981, and at six was badly burned in the 1988 Ramstein air show disaster; the teasing that followed at school pushed him toward music instead, by his own account.
His first releases came in 2006, and Fckng Serious, the label he founded in 2015 with Ann Clue and Deniz Bul, became the platform for spreading that sound rather than keeping it to himself. A pair of livestreamed sets — one for the French channel Cercle, one at Tomorrowland — have racked up a combined 140 million YouTube views between them, proof that a genre with a made-up name can still fill a festival's biggest stage.