He refuses to play his biggest hit. He thinks EDM is anathema, and he has a laser show that riffs on the Wizard Of Oz. Is it time to rethink Eric Prydz?

Slap bang in the centre of the Hollywood Palladium’s art deco-inspired circular ceiling design sits a lonely disco ball. On a typical night it’s probably given a moment or two to – wait for it – shine, but tonight Swedish superstar DJ and producer Eric Prydz has brought his EPIC 4.0 live show to town (that stands for Eric Prydz In Concert, by the way) and the poor thing’s not getting a look in.

Dressed a bit like nu-metal-era Fred Durst – backwards navy baseball cap, oversized plain T-shirt, a dusting of stubble – Prydz teases out his two-hour set of relentless, organ-displacing house bangers. It’s all dished out from behind a gargantuan light show replete with lime green lasers, holograms of swirling tornadoes and an imposing laser scan of his own face that looms over him like the wizard from Wizard Of Oz.

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It’s a simultaneous barrage of all the senses. At one point I feel my hair tremble and one of my eyes momentarily dislodge from its socket. Encased in an ever-shifting light cube, Prydz himself is glimpsed fleetingly, often with one hand in the air playing an imaginary piano. He’s urging the crowd – most of whom are dressed for the beach in shorts, vest and sunglasses – to take their energy levels from Red Bull-induced seizure to double vodka and Red Bull-induced seizure.

One song absent from Prydz’s setlist is his 2004 mega-hit Call On Me, a song inspired by French Touch and built around a sample of Steve Winwood’s Valerie, the video to which became most teenage boys’ masturbatory aid of choice (when former British prime minster Tony Blair first saw it he said that he almost fell off his rowing machine). In fact Prydz hasn’t played Call On Me for over 10 years (he refers to it now as “super lazy”), much to the disgust of fans in Canada who showed their displeasure by bottling his decks when he failed to play the track.

A contrary fellow (he turned down piano lessons as a kid in favour of teaching himself because he hated the rules), Prydz has an odd relationship with mainstream dance music, at a time when dance music is booming in America. With his post-Call On Me output leaning more towards progressive house than radio-made, chart-friendly EDM (his new album Opus is a bottom-numbing two hours long and the title track got a 10-minute experimental reworking from Four Tet). He’s frustrated at being lumped in with the Vegas-headlining DJs (although he’s had his own Vegas residency in 2013), and has so far ignored the offers of work from various pop stars (he’d like to work with Adele, though, if she’s reading this). He’s disparaging about EDM and its consumers, perhaps burned by the fact that the output of EDM whippersnappers like Martin Garrix isn’t a million miles away from his work.

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“Musically it’s very accessible, quite cheesy and very pop,” he tells me as we recline in the LA sun outside his sprawling house situated beneath the Hollywood sign, a couple of weeks before the Palladium show.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Call on him? Eric Prydz. Photograph: Press handout

“It’s not house or techno. It’s pop music with a four-four beat.” As for the fans still wanting to hear Call On Me? “I call it iTunes fans – it’s normal consumers who listen to the radio and they like the top 10 on iTunes so they like that song one week and then the next it’s something else. It’s like fast food, week-to-week music consumption.”

'The EDM thing is almost like pot,' he says, popping a lump of dipping tobacco under his top lip

He’s also out of step with the stereotypical superstar DJ life, his fear of flying meaning he often spends hours on tour buses (“Most of those private planes don’t even have toilets you know,” he offers meekly). You get the sense that Prydz could knock out an EDM chart-gobbler in his sleep, but rather than immerse himself fully in that world he remains on the periphery, happy to take headline slots at lucrative dance festivals buoyed by the EDM boom, but not succumbing fully to the world of “molly” and “drops”. With one sensible trainer slightly in that world, Prydz is able to straddle dance music’s underground scene, often DJing small clubs under his aliases Pryda (melodic, experimental house) and Cirez D (harder-edged techno).

For Prydz, dance music’s mainstream success has helped galvanise the underground scene. “The EDM thing is almost like pot,” he says, popping a lump of dipping tobacco under his top lip. “Like when people say ‘if you’re going to smoke pot, then you’ll start doing heroin soon and moving on to stronger things. More refined.’

“The whole EDM thing is very accessible, it’s like McDonald’s or something. You go to your first festival and you see these acts and it’s the confetti and it’s the boom and the screaming in the mic and the big melodies, and I can see how a 16-year-old kid at their first festival would get hooked on that. But you’re going to get older and your music taste will get more refined. You’ll develop a genuine interest in music.”

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With the final thrums of Opus’s title track ringing in my ears, and the Palladium crowd spilling out into the 24-hour diners nearby, I’m keen to enjoy some refined musical heroin. Skidding along the freeway in his PR’s BMW, we make our way to LA’s downtown arts district, a labyrinthine cluster of industrial buildings that are probably used for filming new Amazon Prime TV shows in the day, but that look suitably decrepit at night. Prydz is due to play a two-hour set, starting at 2am, as Cirez D in a small club opposite what looks like a disused barn.

Inside, the retina-destroying light show of the Palladium has been replaced by a few spotlights and black walls that seem to already be oozing sweat. Backstage – well it’s a loading bay with a fridge and toilet – Prydz seems happy with how the main show went, although he tells me the screens he uses weren’t working, so he couldn’t actually see the crowd’s reaction through the bank of lights, relying instead on texting people to make sure everyone was still there. He seems relaxed and almost giddy at the prospect of the Cirez D set. Suddenly a pony-tailed, very LA-looking friend arrives and promptly flicks Prydz on the penis, which seems to be part of an ongoing prank (“I can’t have any more kids now,” Prydz shouts). With all-blokes-together bonhomie at a high, someone else then suggests the friend pull Prydz’s trousers down mid-set, which everyone decides would be quite funny.

Fortunately for Prydz the trousers stay on. Not that the sweaty crowd pushed up against the barrier at the front of his decks would notice, so enraptured are they with the darkly pulsating, multilayered swirl of noise that bounces around the room. Some are even wearing Pryda and Cirez D T-shirts. With both aliases having always run parallel to the music released as Eric Prydz, their existence doesn’t feel gimmicky, more just another outlet for his creativity. In his own quiet way, the seemingly unflappable Prydz just enjoys making a shitload of music. “It’s like the way I meditate almost,” he says. “And tonight I can go to this sort of dark underground hole and do this musically totally different thing for a few hundred people. But that’s just the way I am – I love this and I love that and I’ve found a way to do both.”

Opus is out now on Virgin