It’s not every week, or even every year that Adelaide has the #1 DJ (as voted by DJ Mag) playing in town. Weeks before the night, the hype and expectations were building ever higher and a slight sense of it not being able to meet those expectations nearly set in for me. Fortunatley Van Dyk quickly blew them all away just like he did previously at Traffic a few years back. 

Upon entering the door at the beginning of Dr Damage’s set and seeing the huge turnout (on a Wednesday night and all) it was already a little hard to walk between the bars… and it didnt get much better for the next four or so hours. The huge response when Paul Van Dyk stepped up would have to be one of the biggest I have ever seen at Earth and apart from a sort of house-ish track at the start, he never let up on the big trance sound with whopping basslines that crowd absolutely loved. 

Mixing from two laptops running Ableton with tracks being loaded in via the CDJ’s made for an fairly unique approach to mixing. A lot of sounds from different tracks came in and out over other tracks, then further on, the tracks were dropped in their entirity. A lot of the stuff he played I didnt know… it was very bass driven, kind of like the stuff made by Randy Katana. People were definately waiting for the well-known and ‘Politics of Dancing’ tracks to be dropped. There was a small sprinkle of them during the first two hours… I can remember a few off “Out There And Back”. The last hour contained “The Other Side”  and “For An Angel” ... probably more but things started to get a little hazy towards the end. The crowd was huge and relentlessly dancing to the tracks which drew influences from electro and epic trance, with a very synthetic sound all round. 

There were quite a few familiar faces dotted around the crowd, Dagman and other familiar ITM faces like LightningChyld, Cammyxxoo, Yancey, Goatboy, Laserhands and Grooveasylum. I’m sure there were plenty more there, but I can’t remember seeing them (sorry if i did and forgot)! Jo$h carried on right where PvD left off, but I wasn’t around for most of it as I was trying to meet up with my lift home. After three hours of PvD, and this being a worknight, the crowd was growing weary and was thinning out as expected after his last tracks. It was a phenomenal turnout for a Wednesday, and the impact this star’s apprearance made on the local dance music loving community was undeniable. Needless to say, Thursday’s nine-to-fiver would have been quite a struggle for the PvD fans! A huge thanks to Sushi & Earth for making sure Adelaide didn’t miss out on such an amazing DJ.