Whats so bad about Paul Van Dyk again

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i mean, do his releases suck? his mix cds? ive only heard some of his dj sets, and they are excellent

― fe zaffe (fezaffe), Tuesday, 26 April 2005 21:37 (twenty years ago)

BOOM BOOM BOOM BOOM

ba boom

BOOM BOOM BOOM

ba boom

BOOM BOOM BOOM

ba boom

etc. is what's lame.

― mrjosh (mrjosh), Tuesday, 26 April 2005 21:50 (twenty years ago)

fair enough. do you like guitars

― fe zaffe (fezaffe), Tuesday, 26 April 2005 21:52 (twenty years ago)

Paul van Dyk - Live at Energy 2003

― fe zaffe (fezaffe), Tuesday, 26 April 2005 21:53 (twenty years ago)

http://www.thememoryhole.org/war/gulfwar2/aljazeera02.jpg

― Disco Nihilist (mjt), Tuesday, 26 April 2005 23:16 (twenty years ago)

what's a guitar

― jed_ (jed), Tuesday, 26 April 2005 23:21 (twenty years ago)

it absolutely flies in the face of accepted electronic music cool.

paul van dyk fans are fanatics. they dress like dayglo freaks and write "POWERED BY PURE PVD" on their foreheads in magic marker. their guy plays in all the big superclubs and practically weekly on the radio. you don't need to know anything to "get" it. trance messageboards are full of conversion stories. "i took one mitsubishi before a PVD night and the skies opened up". all you need is a $10- pill and a CD you could buy at walmart or in the front rack at tower records.

no gatekeepers - isn't the big trance club called gatecrasher? no detroit "those who know don't tell policy". no scouring cutout bins. no smug deep house tight-lippedness. no kissing ass of strangers for london pirate radio tapes.

so i'd put at least 50% of the hate down to a distaste for entryism.

then there's ALSO the fact that the music really IS crappy lowest-common-denom type stuff ... those faux-classical synth lines just kill it.

― vahid (vahid), Tuesday, 26 April 2005 23:44 (twenty years ago)

I bought and listened to one of his albums when I was taking vicodin after having my wisdom teeth out. It was really, really good but I don't know if I've listened to it much since.

― mike h. (mike h.), Wednesday, 27 April 2005 01:09 (twenty years ago)

I like his stuff - it's really heart melting if you're in the right mood and it has a nice fuzzy bounce in the drums too.

― moley, Wednesday, 27 April 2005 01:21 (twenty years ago)

I have found that prolonged exposure to this type of music completely destroys one's will to live. c.f. Chicane especially.

It's the aural equivalent sedative hypnotic abuse - rapidly diminshing returns, brain-eroding bland samey-ness, complete absence of glamour, excitement or dynamic, vague reflected cachet of older, more 'serious' siblings - and fetishisation of 20th century psychology/mind control tools/techniques (let your mind be free).

― antiskream (jcartledge), Wednesday, 27 April 2005 03:46 (twenty years ago)

yes, that's exactly how i feel about most kompakt / perlon / trapez / musik krause / telegraph / etc...

― vahid (vahid), Wednesday, 27 April 2005 03:54 (twenty years ago)

anyway that's bourgeois ~~music crit~~ life for you, isn't it?

― vahid (vahid), Wednesday, 27 April 2005 03:55 (twenty years ago)

I like a lot of Paul Van Dyke, though he haven't anything by him that's grabbed me for at least several years.

Vahid's microhouse comparison is timely not in that it's right, but in that "rapidly diminshing returns, brain-eroding bland samey-ness, complete absence of glamour, excitement or dynamic, vague reflected cachet of older, more 'serious' siblings" is a set of accusations you could level at a lot of music indeed, and indeed lots of people have said it about dance music generally.

I often think of this sort of trance as being the dance music against which dance music fans allow themselves the perverse pleasure of being anti-dance rockist. ie. they get to enjoy castigating music for its (choose 3 or 4 of the following) faceless, characterless, anti-naturalistic, melodramatic, rigid, grid-like, unexperimental, grindingly hedonistic qualities while still maintaining that they love dance music.

Which is not to say that you can't legimately dislike Paul Van Dyk, but I wish people used other thoughts in doing so.

― Tim Finney (Tim Finney), Wednesday, 27 April 2005 04:13 (twenty years ago)

yo yr 2nd paragraph is what my 2nd post was about. hell, you could say it about any set of movies or books or paintings or products without even changing a word!

― vahid (vahid), Wednesday, 27 April 2005 04:15 (twenty years ago)

you could say it about eating pizza!! talk about PVD dammit!!

― vahid (vahid), Wednesday, 27 April 2005 04:15 (twenty years ago)

i can handle pretty much anything except the faux-classical. i don't even like it when grimists or timbaland or dr dre or the beatles do that.

― vahid (vahid), Wednesday, 27 April 2005 04:17 (twenty years ago)

HAHA HPENCIL

― Open your eyes; you can fly! (ex machina), Wednesday, 27 April 2005 04:18 (twenty years ago)

Vahid what about "The Green Man"????

(I expected that's what you were getting at BTW, I just didn't want to see the debate become trance vs microhouse when that's not really the point)

― Tim Finney (Tim Finney), Wednesday, 27 April 2005 04:27 (twenty years ago)

> you could say it about eating pizza!! talk about PVD dammit!!

But this is how listening to PVD makes me feel, and I also feel that his music/package features those attributes intentionally (fine if you dig it, I don't) in a calculatedly non-threatening way. I don't find it beautiful/pleasant, it fills me with ennui which is not why I listen to music. America does the same thing for me.
I'm not saying all music has to be threatening/exciting/whatever, simply that more than 10 minutes of PVD or similar makes me start to curl up inside.

― jcartledge (jcartledge), Wednesday, 27 April 2005 04:27 (twenty years ago)

Also, I do not believe pizza fetishises psychology/mind control, although you could certainly say that it does.
This thread reminds me there's a mix floating around the net somewhere entitled "When Trance was good".

― jcartledge (jcartledge), Wednesday, 27 April 2005 04:51 (twenty years ago)

I've said this before, but you should check out the stuff Paul van Dyk did in the early nineties, before there even was such a thing as pop-trance (and when trance was indeed good). Try "Pump This Universe", "Pumpin'", "45 RPM", "For an Angel" (the original version), the whole "45 RPM" LP, the stuff he did with Cosmic Baby (under the moniker Visions of Shiva), etc. It's all rather different from what he does today.

― Tuomas (Tuomas), Wednesday, 27 April 2005 07:01 (twenty years ago)

five years pass...

Like all kinds of my facebook friends turned out to be secret PvD heads, as evidenced by their status updates when he came to town the other night. I'm all just kinda like, "so people still listen to trance, huh?"

What does ilm think now - 5 years later?

― ljagljana (kkvgz), Friday, 21 May 2010 14:41 (fifteen years ago)

Probably the same.

Don't know if it's mentioned upthread anywhere but his early MFS mix album - X-Mix 1: The MFS Trip is definitely worth checking out

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s2zUzu50yog

― groovypanda, Friday, 21 May 2010 14:44 (fifteen years ago)

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