Yay! I luckily got a free ticket to Paul van Dyk’s event last October 13 at A-Venue in Makati and which was organized by Bigfish Manila and sponsored by Nokia. The ticket came via a radio promo during the Bigfish Radio show, which airs on Magic 89.9 every Saturday night. The promo question at that instance I joined asked the listeners to name one album by Paul van Dyk. I e-mailed my answer, In Between and that got me one of the complimentary tickets! Thanks Bigfish!

I’m a fan of Paul van Dyk (since 2005) and I’ve actually bought a few of his albums. I wanted to go to his 2006 visit in Manila but I considered the ticket price to be a bit too steep then and I had no one to go with. (I instead got to attend Tiësto’s concert, and that was for free too. ) Paul van Dyk’s event is actually the first music event I attended this year. The last one was in 2008 when the British duo DJ John “00” Fleming and Digital Blonde visited Manila. I also got the ticket to that event for free too! (Thanks Jayvee!)

I unfortunately didn’t get to finish Paul van Dyk’s set. It was a freaking Tuesday night and I had work the next day! So I left at around 2:30 a.m., about an hour and a half into his set, just to get some sleep. But the lack of sleep was definitely worth it. Surprisingly, he didn’t play a pure trance set—I was bemused to hear remixes of the house classic “Plastic Dreams” by Jaydee and even Daft Punk’s hit “Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger”. I also heard a few PvD hits, like “For an Angel” and “Let Go”. Sadly, I didn’t catch “Home” and “Nothing but You”.

Shown below are some pictures I took during the event. The rest of them can be found in Flickr. I also uploaded a video on YouTube which has part of “For An Angel”, set to a fantastic light and pyrotechnic display.

Anyway, I’m now looking forward to Armin van Buuren’s event this Thursday (also organized by Bigfish). I’m quite a big fan of this Dutch DJ’s A State of Trance radio show, and it is from that show where I usually get most of the trance songs that I feature in my Groovee Playlist™ posts. I also joined the Bigfish radio promo for free tickets to Armin van Buuren, but they might probably want to give the complimentary tickets to a different set of people now. If I do manage to go to Armin’s set, that would make it three DJ Mag’s World’s #1 DJs (see previous vaes9 post) that I have seen live. Tiësto had the top spot from 2002 to 2004, while Paul van Dyk held the crown in 2005 and 2006. In 2007, Armin stole the #1 place and held on to it ever since. We’ll see if he stays on top of the ladder in 2010.