DJ Paul van Dyk happy to play Hong Kong again and even happier to be alive after near-fatal accident
After suffering spinal injuries and severe brain trauma in a fall last year, the ‘titan of trance’ has fought back, relearning to speak, and is back at the top of his game. He talks about growing up in East Berlin and his return to music
And for more than 20 years van Dyk has transcended the genre’s boundaries, retaining the surface details of trance as a framework within which to experiment. His uplifting, wistful, future disco integrates techno, dub and acid house and breaks into trance’s shimmering synths and ethereal melodies. For once there is substance behind the grandiose whooshing atmospherics.
I had severe brain injuries – I had to learn how to speak again – so I wasn’t sure whether I’d be able to make or understand music
In some ways, van Dyk is an unlikely candidate for a career encompassing eight albums – his latest, From Then On, is currently riding high in the charts after it was released on October 20 – top position in numerous best-DJ charts, a Grammy award in 2008 and a nomination in 2003, and global adulation over a quarter of a century.
Born in 1971 in communist East Germany, he got his love of music listening to it illicitly, with early favourites including The Smiths and New Order.
“I grew up in East Berlin, listening to music on radio stations that came out of West Berlin,” he says. “I had to listen to it in secret, and I couldn’t talk about it. Well, I had two or three very close friends with the same interests, and we protected each other. But there’s wasn’t the sense of a bigger youth culture, of a group of people listening to the same music and talking about it. It meant there was a big demand for it when the [Berlin] wall came down.”