It's not the average Taipei citizen that will be looking to go dancing hours before work on Monday morning, but Paul Van Dyk isn't an average DJ.
The "leader of the trance nation" will be making a return trip to Taipei at 2nd Floor Sunday night and spin for a town that's in love with a sound he helped pioneer.
"I'm hoping that we get a lot of people to come out and bring with them a good vibe," he said in a phone interview from Berlin. "I have good memories of my last trip to Taipei and am looking forward to coming back and exposing more people to this music."
Van Dyk's own exposure to dance music started in East Germany. "We were able to see Westside TV and listen to western radio stations. We recorded the music and replayed it at our parties, because in the east we didn't have a club culture," he said.
Two years after the wall came down Van Dyk made his debut, playing at the nascent Berlin club Turbine. Another two years would see the release of his first full-length recording, 45 RPM, on the MFS label. All the while he played regular sets at Berlin's legendary E Werk nightclub. "The music back then was hard Detroit techno. I liked the energetic spirit, but something was missing. I was looking for something else," he said.
Over the next few years Van Dyk would remix tracks by Inspiral Carpets, Curve, New Order, Faithless and others before releasing his second album, Seven Ways, which garnered him extensive media accolades, including DJ magazine's "album of the year" award and Mixmag's "man of the year" honor. Muzic Magazine also named him "leader of the trance nation," though it's not clear what responsibilities the role entails. His newfound popularity sent him spinning around the globe as a DJ and he's spent much of the past decade honing his craft in front of millions of revelers, though he's still found time to return to the studio.
"Simply spinning or producing some tracks without feelings, without communication, without inspiration ? this isn't enough. My music grows with the reactions of the listeners, there's communication between us," he said.
Van Dyk divorced himself from MFS in 1999, and he started up his own label, Vandit Records. Having won the legal rights to his entire back catalogue, he released part of it as a three CD set, Vorsprung Dyk Technik. In the following two years he'd release new material, Out There and Back and The Politics of Dancing, a blistering double CD mix of seminal dance tunes and several of Van Dyk's own pieces.
"I remember in the beginning of the 1990s we all said that this was as much a political movement as a cultural one. But now clubs are getting closed by the authorities. They don't understand and accept it as a global youth culture. That's what I wanted to make people aware of with Politics."
Nowhere is this more true than in Taipei, which has recently heard a stable of top-name DJs: John "00" Fleming played to a near-capacity crowd at 2nd Floor; James Levine spun a very forgettable set at Room 18, looking for the turnstyles after 20 minutes; and "world's (was) No. 1 DJ" Paul Oakenfold came to play music and sell Heineken at Taiwan University Stadium. For anyone keeping count, even as Oakenfold was playing Taipei, readers of DJ magazine were voting him out of the top DJ slot -- he's now No. 6, behind Van Dyk, who retained his No. 4 position for a record fifth consecutive year. Tiesto, Sasha and John Digweed captured the top three positions in results released in the magazine's November issue.
Van Dyk, for his part, is characteristically nonplussed by the attention.
"Djing ? making music, for me, is a very interactive experience," he said.
"It's knowing where the audience is and knowing where to take them to next. It's not about what position I am in the sales charts."
His most recent project, PVD DVD, will be available in February. A film crew followed Van Dyk on a world club tour, filming his sets in a dozen different cities. The music was recorded using new Dolby 5.1 surround sound and PVD DVD is the first electronic dance album, as far as Van Dyk knows, to be made using the technology.
Sunday night's show will start at 8pm with 2nd Floor resident DJs Cliff and Darryl Ho, followed by Electric Fan, a DJ/VJ combination accompanied by a live vocalist and keyboardist. Van Dyk goes on deck at around 11:30pm for a scheduled three-hour set and DJ Reason will spin revelers into early Monday morning. Tickets cost NT$1,000 at the door. Advance tickets are available for NT$900 at AMP Music and Clothing through tomorrow.
For your information:
2nd Floor is located at 15 Hoping W. Rd., Sec. 1, Taipei (北市和平西路一段15號)
AMP Music and Clothing is located at B1, Lane 205, 9 Chunghsiao E. Rd.,Sec. 4, Taipei (北市忠孝東路四段205巷9號B1) and can be reached by
calling (02) 2721-6336
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