At 3am on a club dancefloor, Deetron is the kind of DJ who makes you appreciate the rough edges. Playing vinyl on three turntables with a pair of CDJs for a ccapellas and custom edits, his approach is determinedly hands-on. It’s a special kind of charge he creates in a room. Records move in and out of the mix, sometimes precariously, but the groove remains. It comes as no surprise that he started out as a hip hop turntablist. “From some tracks I only like the beat or certain sections,” he explained to inthemix in 2010, “so I might just play short pieces.” In other words, a three-hour set doesn’t allow for many leisurely toilet breaks.

The mix-CD format could feel too rigid for a DJ of Deetron’s instincts. However, if any series was going to bottle what he does in clubs, it had to be Balance. As the man himself put it to us as he was putting the finishing touches on his handiwork: “I’ve been given all the room that I need.”

It’s a sentiment you hear often from DJs tasked with Balance volumes. “I just did what ever I wanted to do,” Joris Voorn told inthemix in 2009 following his masterful double-disc effort, and the same goes for other recent inductees like Will Saul, Henry Saiz and Lee Burridge. The other Balance ace card is its capacity to surprise: in the space of a few volumes, the series can move from the challenging eclecticism of Agoria to the more straight-laced build of proven quantity Nick Warren. The ‘progressive house’ tag has a hard time sticking to the series these days, and while Nic Fanciulli is next in line, there’s likely to be wildcards ahead.

So what did Deetron do with all that room to move? His Balance 020 is split in two parts: the first disc is mixed digitally with additional editing and production in Cubase and Wavelab, while the second was crafted on three turntables and a mixer. 2011 saw the ‘digital vs analogue’ discussion continue to circle (“I don’t know what these crazy people are doing,” Richie Hawtin said to inthemix about his vinyl-devoted peers), but it’s a good thing Deetron can see the potential in both. The tools don’t make the DJ: it’s what you do with them.

On paper, the Balance 020 tracklist looks like a lot to take in. With 53 tracks making the cut, a fair few of the 2011’s most impactful records are ticked off, and there are towering names at every turn. Any inkling there might be too many big-hitters for one compilation, however, is dispelled by Deetron’s flair for piecing it all together. From the opening salvo of disc one – the blissed-out Autechre intro swelling into a digital weave of Model 500 and Reno Wurzbacher – the key word is ‘drama’. That’s not a happy accident, either, with Deetron quoting the “cinematic approach and dramaturgy” of Laurent Garnier’s classic X Mix as inspiration for what he’s done here.

By the time the forceful kick of Shit Robot’s Losing My Patience enters the mix, the groove is locked. What disc one lacks in the raw physicality of a Deetron club set is compensated for in inventive construction – although you could argue there’s a missed opportunity for a more drawn-out, ambient opening half. Instead, the DJ is in constant motion right from the outset; teasing melodies and basslines in and out, giving us two-minute edits of much longer tracks, stacking swelling moment on swelling moment. When a record needs to breathe, though, he’ll allow it: Move D’s luxuriant deep houser Your Personal Healer being one very wise example.

Deetron recently enthused to inthemix about the “exchange” between bass music and techno, and he puts those connections to use throughout his Balance effort. Taking a thread of Yellow Train – released by French duo Resonance in 1975 – and working some sonorous bass under it is one of the genius moves that gives the digital disc its depth. Crucially, though, you don’t need to pick apart the individual parts to appreciate the whole.

For all the dexterity, there are simple pleasures too; like the way Maceo Plex’s You & Me threads out of the Burial/Four Tet/Thom Yorke love-in with nothing more than on-point mixing. The colossal build of Caribou’s Virgo Four remix (undoubtedly one of 2011’s best) finds Deetron in familiar territory, and he holds us there until the dubbed-out final stretch.

Knowing the second CD was mixed on vinyl brings certain expectations: ‘warmth’, a bit of crackle, some unvarnished edges. In Deetron’s hands you get all those things, but he’s identifiably the same DJ from disc one. The turntables seem to inspire Deetron’s body-jacking impulses, though, and anyone who turned out to his sets at Stereosonic will recognise the pulse that runs through this analogue effort. “Beat-mixing is one of the reasons I’m at this game,” Deetron told Resident Advisor a couple of years back. “I guess the day I stop beat-mixing is the day I call it quits.”

Disc two finds him still beat-mixing with finesse while working the third turntable to formidable effect, but it’s his ear as a selector that carries the set. From Reggie Dokes’s textured piano house gem Haiti to the mechanical heft of Cosmin TRG, there’s no shortage of special records here. The robust way Deetron weaves them together makes the analogue disc the more gripping of the two. Our host bows out with one of his own weapons: eight incident-filled minutes of building techno called Collide. Balance 020 is dramatic to the last, and it’s a story that’ll keep drawing you back.

Balance 020 is out now on Balance Music, distributed by EMI.