The time when club DJs could come and go without notice has surely passed. Not only was Avalon more crowded a week ago last Thursday night for German DJ Paul Van Dyk — touring in support of Global (Mute), his new CD/DVD set — than I’ve ever seen it for a DJ show, but when he finally arrived at the turntable booth, he was greeted with cheers and more cheers, like a rock star. To his fans — a worldwide collection, but mostly European — a rock star he is, and he was welcomed here in Boston, where few Euro-techno DJ stylists have visited.

Neither did he disappoint. He played an uncompromisingly Euro-style set, very fast in tempo (132 beats per minute as opposed to the 126 that is standard to Chicago house music), heavily synthesized, melodic, full of risky changes. He quick-jumped, over and over, from thin, sharp noise effects to thick, clumpy beat passages, slicing the music and packing it and, at high tempo, energizing the dancers to turn this way and that. Only occasionally did he slow things down, when without warning he’d cut the beats and make the thin sharp noise effects collapse. Cheers greeted his silence breaks.

Van Dyk played many of the 13 tracks from the new CD, but only in the second half of his two-hour set did he revert to the continuous melodic flow that’s so evident in his studio work. Having tossed and turned his fans till they were slaves to anticipation, he now refused to be anticipated; and though instrumental presentation is his usual mode, he dropped some male vocals into his set, and then some female vocals ("Tell Me Why," featuring Saint Etienne’s Edith Cracknell), only to withdraw them as he reverted to wordless melodicism.

Van Dyk’s style lacks a lot of what Americans expect of dance music. It isn’t soulful at all, it has no grit, and he doesn’t exhibit much turntable art. At Avalon, he did no overlay mixes at all, and few fader knob distortions. Most of the sonic changes in his set were already present in the 12-inch records he played rather than created by his sleight of hand. His set displayed a formal approach more suggestive of classical music than of the jazz improvisation usual to American DJing. Still, it’s the very formality of his music that Van Dyk’s fans love — a music in which the audience’s expectations are first confirmed and then upended.