Paul van Dyk’s story starts on the eastern side of a divided Germany, before Berlin became one of the obvious capitals of electronic music. Growing up in East Germany meant Western records weren’t simply sitting in every shop waiting to be bought. Like plenty of young music heads behind the Wall, he listened to Western radio and recorded what he could onto tape. Those broadcasts were a window into another world — music travelling across a border even when people couldn’t.

Then the Berlin Wall came down and everything changed ridiculously quickly. Reunification didn’t just open the city physically; it left empty buildings, warehouses and strange forgotten spaces that young Berliners turned into clubs. Techno fitted the moment perfectly: hard, futuristic music being played in places that hadn’t been clubs six months earlier. Van Dyk arrived as a DJ while that new Berlin scene was still finding out what it was.

Early appearances included Tresor, but another important home was Turbine, where he became a regular. The music around him wasn’t neatly separated into the genre boxes we’d use now. Techno, trance and the more melodic European records were all developing alongside each other. Van Dyk leaned towards records with movement and emotion — music that could drive hard but still give you that massive lift when the melody finally opened up.

Production came early too. Working with Cosmic Baby as The Visions of Shiva produced records including “Perfect Day” and “How Much Can You Take?”, putting van Dyk into the studio side of the German trance movement as well as the clubs. By 1994 he had his first album, 45 RPM, and tucked inside it was the original version of the tune that would follow him for the rest of his career: “For an Angel”.

The funny thing about “For an Angel” is that the version most ravers know wasn’t the end of the story in 1994. The track came back in a reworked form later in the decade and absolutely flew. That melody became one of those trance riffs you could recognise from a few notes in a noisy room. It had all the stuff van Dyk was good at: energy underneath, emotion on top and a breakdown big enough to make an entire club look towards the booth.

Seven Ways in 1996 pushed him further out of Berlin and into the international circuit. By then trance was growing fast across Europe and Britain was catching it hard. Clubs and promoters that had come through house and rave were filling rooms with longer, more melodic sets, while DJs from Germany and the Netherlands were becoming regular names on UK flyers. Van Dyk fit that moment without sounding like he’d suddenly changed direction to chase it.

E-Werk became a defining Berlin residency during that rise. Van Dyk later connected the club directly to the 1998 reworking of “For an Angel”, the version that turned an album track from 45 RPM into one of trance’s lasting anthems. In Britain, Gatecrasher became the equivalent long-form laboratory: extended sets, sometimes running six hours, gave him room to move beyond obvious peak-time trance and build the whole night as a journey.

The Love Parade years show how mad the scale had become. What started in Berlin as a small electronic-music gathering turned into hundreds of thousands of people filling the city’s streets, and van Dyk became one of the German DJs most closely associated with that era. Put those images next to the early post-Wall clubs and the change is bonkers: in a few years this music had gone from half-legal rooms in a broken city to enormous outdoor crowds.

Britain heard plenty of him too. His BBC Radio 1 Essential Mix from 20 April 1997 lands right before trance went completely through the roof here. Gatecrasher, Cream, Godskitchen and the big arena events would soon be packed with the sound. That mix catches the period while it still feels like the scene is accelerating rather than looking back at a finished formula.

By the turn of the millennium van Dyk was one of trance’s biggest international DJs. Out There and Back arrived in 2000, and Vandit gave him his own label platform for releases and new artists. International touring, radio and later albums kept the career moving long after the first trance boom had cooled down. He also kept resisting the idea that everything he played needed one tidy genre sticker on it — fair enough when his career had started before half those stickers existed.

That’s why Paul van Dyk belongs in this archive. His story connects two huge bits of rave history that can look separate if you only stare at genre names: the raw freedom of post-Wall Berlin and the giant trance floors of the late 90s and early 2000s. Our 1997 Essential Mix sits right between them. Put it on and you’re hearing a DJ who had come out of that new Berlin underground just as the music was about to become absolutely massive everywhere else.