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.
Taipei Times: Has anyone ever told you that you look like a young Vladimir Putin?
Van Dyk: What? No, I've never heard that before. ? I've been told that I look something like Nicolas Cage, but never Vladimir Putin.
TT: You don't look much like Nicolas Cage.
Van Dyk: Well, I've never been told I look like Vladimir Putin.
TT: As a producer what do you listen for in an artist?
Van Dyk: Music has to be honest and intense. Whatever it is -- it can range from a freaky songwriter like Alanis Morisette to banging techno -- it has to be intense. It has to come across. It can't be cheesy or wishy-washy.
TT: How do you define "cheesie"?
Van Dyk: Cheesie is the same as too easy ? too wish washy, not intense, not concrete. It's basically combining a little fluffy melody here, adding a nice little snare roll there, but it's not intense. ? There's a very fine line between making melodic dance music and making cheesy pop melodic music which is danceable.
TT: You've scored a couple of films recently, yes?
Van Dyk: Yes. La Mano del Zudro is finished. and we're still working on One Perfect Day.
TT: You've said that your inspiration as a DJ comes from interacting with your audience. What then inspires you when you're scoring a film?
Van Dyk: Well, I don't like to score films for the reason you just mentioned; there's no interaction ? and making something suitable to the story can be confining. I enjoyed working on La Mano del Zudro because the director gave me free reign. And I don't speak Spanish, so I didn't know the story ? much easier. One Perfect Day is more difficult but it's an exciting project for me. It's about a composer of classical music who falls in love with this kind of clubbing, raver girl. He writes her a song and over the course of the movie the song transforms from a piece of classical music, to a pop song, to a techno dance mix. ? This is what I'm doing, working with composer David Hopson and recording with the Melbourne Philharmonic Orchestra. I'm not scoring the whole film, only this piece of music. ? I'm not trying put electronic music on top of classical music, I'm really trying to merge these two styles and create something unique.
TT: What do you make of the connection between club culture and Ecstasy?
Van Dyk: It's new culture and when there's a new culture there's a lot of resistance and revolution involved. ? I think [the authorities] should be informing people about what they're doing to themselves. ? A lot of these young people, they're going out and taking an E and when they don't feel anything after 30 minutes they take another one then, oh man, they're really flying. Money should be spent on informing people rather than just saying it's illegal, it's bad. ? that's just going to make people want to do it more.
TT: What do you remember most about your previous visit, when the venue was known as @live?
Van Dyk: I remember when I went to the toilet. For us it's a bit strange to just have a hole in the floor. I was a bit afraid actually. I had to pee halfway through my set and I couldn't go.
TT: You'll be giving interviews with local MTV and GQ while you're in Taipei. What else do you want to do while you're in town?
Van Dyk: Well, it sounds cheesy, but I'd like to go sightseeing. Last time, all I could see was what I saw from the window of my hotel.
TT: Are you worried that no one will want to go dancing late on a Sunday night?
Van Dyk: Well, I'm not worried.
"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.
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