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When i was 15, i remember i started buying metal records (started with heavy than proceeded to black and atmospheric, these genres were at their peek in the 90s) but i had a "guilty pleasure". The "quilty pleasure" was, "secretly" buying EDM records by Orbital, underworld, Leftfield, FSOL, Salt Tank etc. (and these were also at their peek at the 90s so it was a great time really!) and compilations (such as Trancemaster) because you know, if you were a metaller you were not supossed to buy "electronic records", this music was for gay fluorescent kids and so it was kind of a taboo lol.
As the years passed, my taste matured from the harshness of black and goth/doom metal (etc.), towards more elegant-but still-dark sounds. When i was 18 i started buying darkwave, post-punk, goth, post-apocalyptic folk and industrial records from the 80s and 90s, from Joy Division, The Cure, Sisters of Mercy, The Chameleons,Sad Lovers And Giants, Cocteau Twins, Dead Can Dance,Bauhaus, Clan Of Xymox,Killing Joke, Mephisto Walz, Death In June, Cabaret Voltaire, Clock DVA to even more underground stuff like Fields of the Nephilim, Garden of Delight, Age Of Heaven, Corpus Delicti,Secret Discovery, Vendemmian, This Burning Effigy and many others (quite underground). To tell you the truth,i still listen to some of this stuff from time to time-mainly the classic 80s stuff because this music is really good and full of quality.
During these "dark years" though (in...1998-99...) i remember this mainstream radio station of my town playing these very melodic dance records which i liked a lot. I rememeber listening to the En-Mass mix of Synaesthesia and El-Nino among others and being very impressed by the atmospheric, ethereal qualities as well as the energy of the sound. I thought that this type of "trance" was the evolution of the trance compilations i used to buy a few years back in the mid-90s and i liked it a lot, so i remember "secretly" buying a few records again from Oakenfold and Sasha. To confuse matters even more, "epic-trance" never got famous in Greece, in contrast to "Psy-Trance" which was the sound of choice by the vast majority-Astral Projection, MFG, Transwave and Juno Reactor were famous names in Greece back in 99! i even remember going to a lot of open-air psy-trance parties with my friends, visiting Ololiuqui, Total Eclipse, Transwave, Atmos etc. So i thought that this type of north-european "melodic trance" sound that i "secretly" liked and admired was a very underground thing or something! Who would guess that after a few years this phenomenally "underground sound" would be accused of everything cheese, cheap, derivative and stupid.
Whilst all these musical genres seemed to be radically different to each other, i thought that they were common auditory patterns in all of them, even with the atmospheric black-metal records i use to buy when i was 15. All these had epic, atmospheric synths, the feeling of soundscapes and "richness/vastness" in sound. These are qualities i always liked in music, and these are some of the qualities that i like in my "post-EDM" years of post-rock, shoegaze, ambient, IDM and neo-classical. 
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