For the past fifteen years, Paul van Dyk has held strong as one of dance music’s most popular and enduring stars. Now positioned as one of the global dance community’s elder statesmen, he has just released Volume: The Best of Paul van Dyk, a double-CD celebration of fifteen years of original productions and remixes, re-mastered and brought up to date with today’s production technology. He recently caught up with ITM to provide some insight and opinion all things PVD.

“It’s more intense, and it’s more mature,” Paul begins in explaining how his music has evolved over the past fifteen years, also admitting that his preferred tempo has also evolved in that time. “BPM is a funny thing,” he explains. “And it depends on what sort of time frame you look at. If you look at, for example, some of those real techno classics like CJ Bolland made, those were only 130BPM – which is what the average electro track is these days. With tempos, it’s always about a feel and a place in time. When I say my music now is more intense, I’m not talking about speed or power, but the feel – the roots and the honesty of it. My music has always been somewhere between 130 and 140BPM, and it was very rare – I think the original version of Words is about 150, and that’s the fastest I ever went.”

While Paul van Dyk may be getting older, he’s certainly not slowing down. “I’m still playing full-on, because that’s my energy level,” he says enthusiastically. “That’s what I enjoy, and that’s where the kicks come from for me. My music has quite a vast energy, and quite a bang to it. It’s very intense. If I have a bass drum, then it actually is a bass drum, not this kind of like a ‘wffft’ sound designed so that girls don’t spill their champagne when they’re dancing. My music is about having a go – and maybe having a plastic bottle in your hands instead of a champagne glass, so you don’t hurt anybody! It’s about energy, it’s about letting loose, it’s about going for it, rather than being seen and just wobbling up and down.”

Putting the compilation together, one of the biggest obstacles Paul faced was getting the mix to sound consistent across fifteen years worth of material. “Believe me, it was a production nightmare,” he confesses. “The most difficult thing was my New Order remix – I did that in 1993, I believe – and back then I was working with an old Atari ST computer. That thing was all over the place speed-wise! Going back to that material, I had to beat-correct every single beat, cut it, replace it and make it straight. It was a lot of very intense editing work in order to make everything sound good.”

Central to Paul’s vision for the mix was a big-picture take on how mix would stand as a whole sonically. “Basically, I tried to merge all of the tracks into a mix, getting the essential elements of each track out while at the same time making the mix work as a big piece that you can listen through without feeling ‘oh shit, now the production sort of goes down’ at any point,” he explains. Delving a bit deeper, Paul provides an example of how some of the reconstruction was done. “In order to spice the sub-bass up, for example, we layered the bassline from Humate’s Love Stimulation underneath the previous track – and so when it drops back in, the whole drum pattern from Love Stimulation is already in there.”

For as long as Paul van Dyk has been making and playing music, he’s had an identifiable sound – but it’s not something he’s quick to put any particular label on. “There’s music out there that reaches me, that I like, that, if you’ll excuse the term, grabs my balls, and there’s music that doesn’t,” he says. “Regardless of what you call it – electro house, rock-infused electronic music, or techno, or trance, or drum n’ bass, or whatever, whenever I feel there’s something special about that certain piece of music, I try to incorporate it into my set. If you like what I play as a DJ, most likely you’ll like what I make as a producer – I’m one and the same.”

Clearly, Paul has something to say about those DJs who let others make the records they put their names to. “I’ve developed the same passion for being a musician as I have for being a DJ,” Paul observes when asked to elaborate. “My music means a lot to me, so I don’t have anyone doing it for me that I then need to fill in. I build a song and fill it in right away because it’s my original idea. Of course I have co-producers, of course I have people that I collaborate with, but at the very same time, the core of the track is always an original idea that I had. This is just how I make music. I couldn’t just come along and say ‘yeah, I nicked that off’.”

Our discussion next turns to the issue of how DJ booth technology has changed over the years – and how Paul uses the latest software and controller technology to shape his sets. “I interact much more with the crowd than I could possibly ever have done playing two CDs or two pieces of vinyl into each other,” he says. “The way I play, and the way I use my setup, it’s very open. I can, on the fly, change arrangements, change sounds, change basslines, play something completely different, feeling the vibe and interacting with the audience. It’s a much more intense experience, rather than just working with a finished track and mixing that into another finished track. How I play, I can actually switch a song and change it so it fits much better to the moment of the set when I play it. It provides a really enhanced experience in terms of what electronic music actually is. It’s a much more intense approach for me as a DJ, rather than standing there, waiting for the track to finish so I can mix in the next one. Electronic music has always been about breaking the boundaries, and using the latest technology in order to have an even more special presentation of that music – this is what the music is all about.”

Wrapping up the conversation, the last question is of course the one on many Australians’ minds – when will we see Paul through these parts again? “I’m hoping to be back through Australia very soon,” he says. “I always have a great time when I’m there, and I can’t wait to come back.”

Volume: The Best of Paul van Dyk is out now in Australia through Vandit and Liberator.