DJ Maro Turns Dance Floors Into Spiritual Experiences

Once the fluorescent lights in her office switch off for the night, corporate marketing mogul Megan Beatty can be found deep within the pulsing heart of some of Denver's best nightclubs. Known in the music world as Maro, Beatty spins immersive techno and house beats that sweep club-goers into a carefree space where dancing is an instinct and full-bodied presence is inevitable.

She's played at such hot spots as Beacon, Club Vinyl, Temple and the Black Box, and has even taken her DJ skills out of Colorado, mixing tracks at New York City's House of Yes and creating dusty dance floors in the desert at Burning Man. She even co-founded the Powerhouse DJ School in 2021.

At first glance, her extensive DJ experience paints a portrait of an artist who has spent years chasing her musical passion. But Beatty is a relatively fresh face in the techno realm: She's only been a DJ for a little over two years, and her obsession with techno beats is even greener.

She admits that her reasons for learning how to spin tracks were "partially selfish." It was a create-what-you-seek moment, in which Beatty became the DJ she had always wanted to hear. "I love dancing so much," she says, "and I realized it's not always easy to find great music. ... The DJ can really make or break the night."

A classic club rat, by 2019 Beatty had attended enough events to know the recipe for a great night. "I really wanted there to be reliable spaces where there was music that I loved, and then I could have a great time," she explains. "But more than anything, I wanted to create dance floors that were really full of people comfortable and free to express and dance full out."
She started with a Pioneer DJ DDJ-400 — "a baby set of decks," she laughs — and became a DIY master, absorbing YouTube videos and gleaning tips from her DJ friends. She gave herself a hard deadline: After five months of learning the basics, she would start performing. 

Her first public show was in January 2022, at none other than NYC's the Get Down at the House of Yes. The party was larger than she expected — "a great problem to have," she notes — and the crowd amped up her nerves, leaving room for self-doubt to rear its ugly head.

"That whole night, I physically felt so nervous. My heart was pounding. I remember talking to friends on the dance floor...and my voice was shaking," she recalls. But when "I was deejaying and the music came on, [the nerves] all melted away. It was really surreal. I remember having the thought of, 'Oh, I can totally do this.'"

Her obsession with techno blossomed a few months later. She and her partner were overseas, traversing the cobblestone streets of Berlin, and the appeal of Berghain, one of the city's famous techno clubs, was too strong to resist. The cavernous club is notorious for rumors of extravagant drug use, a strict no-photo rule (what happens in Berghain stays in Berghain) and a harsh door policy, and the couple ended up waiting outside for seven hours to get in.

"I remember turning to my partner at hour four, and I was like, 'At what point are we going to call this?' He just looks at me and he goes, 'We're going in that club.' And I was like, okay, we're committed," she says. "It was so worth it."
Once inside, Beatty was consumed by the pounding bass and throngs of sweaty dancers. The environment fed expressive, connected movement unlike anything she'd experienced before. She likens the night to being in a trance, hypnotized by a swirl of blasting techno that kept them on the dance floor for fifteen hours.

"Being in there for so long...I really got to sink into the music. It wasn't like a two- or three-hour-long show where you go and you're super high-energy. There's stamina to that," she reflects. "We got to this place of almost zen, where it was just like, all right, this is hour eight of hounding techno beats. The only thing I can let it do is just wash over me.

"It was almost a sound-bath experience," she adds. "I felt so cleaned out and revitalized after that."

It took Beatty three days to recover, but the hours on the dance floor left her with more than blistered feet and aching limbs. She walked out with a new appreciation for a music genre that she had previously overlooked.

"If you had asked me, even three years ago, 'Hey, Meg, how do you feel about techno?' I would have said, 'Not my style. It's too hard. I don't really like it,'" she shares. "But after that, I was like, 'Techno is everything. Techno is life.'"

Beatty's sound is infused with spirituality, inspired by the polarity of the freedom of that night in Berghain and the restraints of her conservative Christian upbringing. She grew up in San Diego and attended Biola, a private Christian university in Southern California. After college, she moved to Buena Vista in Colorado to work at a whitewater rafting company before landing in Denver in 2015.

Church and Bible study were important parts of her life, but so were rock climbing, rafting, backpacking and anything else that connected her to nature. She spent her young adulthood deconstructing her beliefs and trying to answer one question: Where can I find God? During her first few years in Denver, she realized the answer had been there all along: the great outdoors.

"The biggest place I found God at that time was the natural world — seeing the miracle of mountains and rivers and hearing the divine voice when I'm out backpacking and when I'm by the ocean, and the wonder and beauty that can inspire in me," she says.
Although she no longer considers herself a Christian, Beatty is firm in her identity as a very spiritual person. For her, the divine exists in spaces that are free, loving, authentic and generous, qualities that are found in abundance in nature and can be re-created on the dance floor.

But she is currently reducing her outdoor activities. Beatty was recently diagnosed with Chronic Inflammatory Response Syndrome (CIRS) and hypothyroidism. She's been struggling with her health for months, and this past year, hiking and backpacking trips were nearly nonexistent.

"For every moment I rally to dance for a few hours, there's ten times more time spent staving off nausea from meds, navigating insurance and in tears because everything hurts," she shared in an Instagram post on December 5. "And I don't want to feel like I can only share the shiny parts of my life."

Although her activities are limited, she's determined to keep the music pumping, and is poised to release her first original techno track, "Fuck It," later this month. Deejaying is also one of the few beloved activities she can still do, though she'll be prioritizing select shows. Her next set is at DV8 Distillery in Boulder on March 2.

"Every time I deejay, my biggest hope is that the space that I can create with my energy and my music is one that is really full of love and generosity, and [where] people feel so accepted for exactly what they are," she says.

"Not only tolerated, but actively celebrated," she adds. "Exactly what you are is exactly what I want this to be on the dance floor, and exactly what this space needs. I guess you could say deejaying is my way of evangelizing love to the world."

DJ Maro plays Pulse Controlled, Saturday, March 2, DV8 Distillery, 2480 49th Street, Unit E, Boulder. Pre-sale tickets are $10, $5 with code MARO.