Around 2:30 AM on a Friday night in October, as Boys Noize finished his set with a remix of Adamski's "Killer," Dave Clarke stood at the back of the stage at Melkweg waiting to begin his set. It was a big gig for Clarke. The UK-born, Amsterdam-based DJ has been putting on this event, Dave Clarke Presents, at Melkweg during ADE for the past 11 years, and the set was a highpoint in a week that saw him bouncing from one engagement to the next, fulfilling his role as a consultant and speaker for ADE, and meeting with journalists to discuss his first album in 14 years, The Desecration Of Desire . As he approached his DJ setup—a laptop running Serato, CDJs, a Pioneer effects unit—Clarke had the assured air someone who's been doing what they do for a very long time. He built a spinning crescendo of effects with the Pioneer RMX 1000, and immediately locked into a performative zone that went unbroken for the next hour and a half.Clarke is well-known and respected for a few different reasons, but his style of DJing is chief among them. He plays techno and electro with the flair and ferocity of a hip-hop turntablist, and he strongly believes in DJing that goes beyond blending one track into another. Back in the '80s, he was indelibly influenced by the showmanship of hip-hop DJs, and adopted their techniques to suit the dance music he was playing. When I caught up with him in the week following the Melkweg gig, he was unable (or perhaps unwilling) to dissect his arsenal of tricks—at this point, he explained, his sets are almost purely instinctual, the product of decades spent refining his style in clubs around the world.Clarke's longevity and appeal as a techno artist can also be explained by his fiercely individualistic streak. While very much being a part of the techno scene, he also stands a little way outside of it. He believes that trends and hype should be avoided at all costs, and his DJ sets down the years have shown this: Clarke has evolved while retaining an easily identifiable taste in techno. (Or to express this another way, "That'sa Dave Clarke record.") He's famously intolerant of bullshit, and he doesn't mind publically critiquing dance music and DJ culture when he thinks it's needed, something you'll see clearly in this Art of DJing feature.Friday was good. There were a lot of people filming, and a lot of people backstage obviously, but I think the general gig itself was really, really good. I really enjoyed it and the crowd were friendly and responsive, so yeah, it was a good hometown gig.I don't find it distracting because the majority of people are quite professional—sometimes it's the person with the camera, the phone, that's distracting, to be honest. When they just stick it in your face and then they stick the flash on, that's not very cool. But film crews are generally quite respectful and they know their boundaries and they don't really get in your hair, but at the same time, you are aware of them being there.Sometimes it can happen due to stress. Occasionally if you're not being picked up at the airport, for example, or there's an issue getting into a festival and people are not being professional, which gets you stressed. I try to be quite quiet before gigs, and I'm very well known for being quite withdrawn, but that's for a reason: it's to keep my energies for myself and for performing.Then, of course, technical problems, depending which ones they are. They can put you off, or they actually inspire you to think differently. So if you've got a problem with the mixer, for example, you can't work your way around it, but if the sound is generally good and the problem is just with the mixer then you just work around it. But if the sound is bad then that can also affect you, of course.Yeah, ironically my gig at Melkweg is one of those gigs where that doesn't really happen because I have so many people that I know, so many people from out of town that pop in, that actually I'm pretty social backstage, but generally I close down completely, prefer to be left alone or with a calm person who I know. After the set it's different, but that's what I try to do. I don't put a carpet down and start doing yoga or anything like that, but I just try and be relaxed and centred and without any distractions.I did. I did with the electro set a little bit, because I very rarely play electro. I would listen to some of the recent electro just to familiarise with it again, because I don't play it that often. But with techno because I do it every single weekend, have done for 30-plus years now, and if I go into the room not knowing what I'm doing that would be a little bit sad. So I don't really need to practise or anything like that, because the way that I listen to music is all down to my radio show, and with the radio show I then categorise everything and then from then it goes into my DJ sets, and if it works well then I keep it in there.When I'm onstage. Sometimes that can be the first track that I played the previous three gigs. Sometimes there's a sonic quality of the first track that I like, where I can actually then vibe out the soundsystem knowing that track really, really well. But that's about it.I use crates, and what it comes down to is that I go through all the tracks, and then I do the radio shows, and then I have a sort of pending folder as well for all the tracks that need to be listened to. And generally 90% of the tracks that I upload to Serato will be from the radio show. I don't upload stuff for the sake of it. I'll make a very quick decision on listening to it, and maybe I'm making a mistake but it works, for me at least, because there is so much music that comes through now.I'll then have all my radio shows in the last three months in boxes, each week. And then when I'm DJing I'll browse through some of those boxes and pick some of those tracks. And then occasionally if I had a really strong set that I felt was really, really good and needed logging, then I'll save the history of that and put a date on it and then put that in my battle box.I only ever used someone, about eight years ago, to actually download the music for me and then put it on a hard drive, because in those days the internet speeds were quite slow. They would download all the music for me and then I would still listen to it. I could possibly trust a few of my super fans to know what music I would like, but I wouldn't feel comfortable about that. I think it's disrespectful to have someone else source your music. I think it's disrespectful of the artist that would trust you to listen to their music. I think it's a very corporate thing to do, and I don't believe in that at all.I got a friend of mine to transfer all my music to digital a long time ago, and that was on CDs, and DVD-ROMs as my archive. So all my vinyl—there had to be a switchover to digital somehow, and at that moment Traktor was just awful, it just wasn't working very well. All the DJs loved the setup but it was always crashing and the sound quality was really bad because hardly anyone was downloading WAVs in those days. I wanted to keep the sound quality at least very, very good, so I elected to have everything put onto DVD-ROM and onto CD to start with, and then I would archive all those DVDs into my computer.A friend of mine asked if I'd tried Serato. I said, "Umm, not sure," and then he said to me, "Well, why don't you see if you can find a track in your CD box, and I'll see if I can find a track in Serato and see who comes first?" I came first because at the time I was pretty good at filing stuff and remembering where things were. But I started to use it. The setup was always a pain in the arse in those days, because you always had to have this extra box, and setting that box up was always very, very clumsy. In a lot of clubs there's only one setup, and it would cause annoyance for the person before, but still I persevered with it. Computers eventually became more and more powerful, more and more reliable, and I suppose when SSDs came up, then it just made everything just better, and less shock-prone, or bass-prone. And now computers for the past three or four years have been really, really reliable. I've been using Serato for about nine or ten years.For a start, my ten years of radio history is already there. A long time ago another supplier of DJ software offered to transfer and translate everything that I had to their own format, but I didn't feel comfortable doing that. So you sort of invest in the system. I mean, my base system is iTunes, always has been. That's OK, but I don't do crates in iTunes. So I use rekordbox as a backup, but I find the software itself very slow, very glitchy, a bit derivative of Serato itself in its GUI. The analysis of the tracks is very slow, and I have a lot of tracks, so what I'll do in rekordbox is I copy across a crate from Serato, physically drag it across into rekordbox, retitle it, and it doesn't capture all the names, so I learnt how to put the names in. Then I have a few crates in rekordbox and USB, so if anything goes down then at least I have a semi-up-to-date version of the recent stuff that I've been playing.Yeah I do. I think when the first CDJs came out I absolutely hated them. I was playing with the Technics [CD decks], the one with the movable platter. I really despised the quality and the sound and everything with the original CDJs. And then Denon came out with some really, really interesting ones, including some which I actually had a part in designing and doing technicalities of. And then the CDJ-2000 Nexus came out and things started to really improve, and now with the Nexus 2 I feel absolutely satisfied with the way things are. I think it really is finally a mature and top-notch combination.If I did, then I wouldn't say them out loud.I would never talk about what things I would like to see because I know how tech development companies read things and then take it without crediting or anything, so I wouldn't say it in an open forum.I don't. I wish that the sync function in Serato for the samples would work independently to the master tempo, that would be a cool feature. But the sync buttons on the Pioneers I don't use at all. I think by the fact that I don't raise my hands and do heart signs constantly throughout my set shows that I'm working, and I have a sort of Calvinistic approach to that, and also a work ethic. I want to be working, I want to be doing that. You will find the sync button being used by a large amount of tech house DJs, and you will find the sync button being used, of course, by EDM people, if they're actually using more than one source for their whole set. It is up to them.For me the whole vinyl versus digital debate is done and dusted, the whole manually manipulating your turntable as opposed to a sync button, I think as a debate doesn't really matter anymore. You know, whatever makes the person happy. You know some people do use sync that are quite technical people, who've earned their stripes and their skills and it frees them up to think about other things to do with the music. So with talented people that use sync, I'm not gonna have a go at them at all, I think that would be a really lame, flat-earth approach. I think everyone should be able to have their own technique and use the tools that are available to them in a way that they must use them.For me, using the pitch control is just something that I like to do. I like to have a little bit of an edge with the mix possibly running away from me. Which isn't really that likely to happen now, because obviously the BPMs are listed quite clearly, but still, it can happen, and I just like that feeling of the mix possibly running away from you, it has a bit of a live feeling and not everything is automated. Because you know if you think about it, we're two or three steps away from software coming out to the club with a hologram of a DJ playing and mixing together with sync, really.Since the CDJ Nexus 2000 has much better link up to Serato they're much better for me now. I really enjoy looping now, because it just works in Serato. The old physical loops were touch and go, you were lucky if you got them sometimes, especially with old disco records. And now it's very quick. It's great for extending a break, or extending some atmosphere and I actually find it very, very important for DJing in the club.Yeah I mean, there's a very basic drum machine on there with just four samples, and 95% of the time it syncs pretty well with everything else. Sometimes it can be out of time and I still haven't figured out why. But most of the time it syncs and it's pretty good.I also use a variety of the sort of tonal controls and sometimes just a little bit of echoes, but I like to layer the effects so that you have these really complex effects. It's much more fun and granular for electro sets. At Whip It I was using that a lot more heavily as a sort of guitar feedback in the electro set. And you can create these incredibly complex reverbs and things like that. There's also a lot of subtleties there as well, which people might not notice, but they extenuate certain frequencies just to give it a bit of excitement sometimes, very subtle though.