Paul van Dyk is not a trance DJ

(Credit: Ultra Records)

This interview with renowned German electronic dance music producer-DJ-remixer Paul van Dyk runs 905 words. The term “trance” appears only in this sentence.

Though the East Berlin native came to symbolize that synthed-out, up-tempo, beat-heavy genre for a while thanks to club hits like “Another Way,” “Tell Me Why” and “Nothing But You,” he has long claimed to have moved beyond it. Just as van Dyk’s globetrotting lifestyle heeds no boundaries, and his iPod playlists roam all over the musical map (“For me, music has to be intense,” he says; “I just bought the album from the Kings of Leon, for example, which I believe is a great band”), the guy often touted as one of the world’s top DJs sees EDM as a constantly changing, ever-expanding space in which he continually challenges any constraints of genre. Still, to a lot of ears, even his most recent artist album, 2007’s “In Between,” sounds plenty like the PvD they’ve long known.

These aren’t matters the serious and precision-minded 37-year-old takes lightly. Van Dyk recently spent a considerable amount of time going through his back-catalog to assemble the new career retrospective dubbed “Volume,” and is now in pre-production on his forthcoming sixth artist album, slated for release next year. As van Dyk would say, it’s all in the name of progress. Metromix asked him about the process—as well as where to get good Italian food in Miami, and the hazards of being PvD.

Why now for a career retrospective album?
Well, it’s pretty much exactly 15 years after my first album came out, so I just thought it was good timing. It probably has as much significance as 10 years would have, or 20. It’s just that I sort of looked at all the music that I made over the years and thought probably it’s time to kind of sum it up somehow and give it a different approach, and maybe make people who only know me since the last album aware of all the other things that I have done before.

Do you think the experience of having combed through your entire back-catalog will have an effect on your next artist album?
No, not really, because I’m always sort of looking for ways of approaching things in a different way. Obviously looking back, I see things that I have already done and that sort of gives me an idea of, “OK, I’ve done this a certain way and obviously it did work very well.” But it doesn’t mean I’m going to do it exactly the same way, ‘cause otherwise I would have done one “For an Angel” after another after the initial success when “For an Angel” came out the first time—and I never really did that.

What do you still want to accomplish within electronic music?
For me, it’s not so much like “the big thing that has to be accomplished.” For me, the important thing is when I do a remix, I want the remix to actually be intense and good and liked by the original artist. If I make a whole track, I like to feel that the initial idea that I had is coming across. Or in terms of shows, I like to have the next show that I’m doing be 100 percent. That’s really what my next goal is rather than, like, getting a Grammy award.

With your travel, you must get to experience some of the best things in the world. So, let’s get down to it: Where’s the best food?
I have to say, one of my favorite restaurants is in downtown Miami. It is, strangely enough, an Italian restaurant run by an Argentinean guy, but it’s really, really good. It’s called La Loggia and it’s definitely some of the best food I’ve ever had: always fresh, very tasty, but it’s not over-tasty—everything just works.

That’s a pretty good picture of where we are in the world right now: The internationally famous German DJ’s favorite restaurant is an Argentinean-owned Italian place in Miami. I get the sense you’re pretty into cultural mash-ups.
Well, the thing is, I like the global approach with the local awareness. For example, when I go somewhere—I wouldn’t go to a German restaurant in America; I wouldn’t go to a German restaurant in China. I want to have actual Chinese food in China. I think this is something very important. I also think, with all the globalization going on, it’s very important that we all open up our own cultures to new influences and learn to live better together on this planet, but at the same time, we can only do this if we are aware of where our cultural roots are.

Is there anything bad about being you?
There are ups and downs in my life like there are in everybody’s life. The thing is, what I do is very time-consuming; it is pretty much 24/7. There is always something going on, and sometimes it’s pretty hard to find a moment to just relax, chill out and calm down—it’s quite a stressful thing. But at the same time, I’m not complaining—I’m a musician and I love making music. It’s the best thing that can happen to an artist: that you have a worldwide audience, that I can travel to wherever I go in the world and find an audience that is actually interested in listening to my music.