As he began his opening set at Rise two Fridays back, Craig Mitchell said to me, “This is gonna be a great night!” And so it was. First, Mitchell played a two-hour set that was soulful and gospel in the extreme, including all of his usual spin-set tracks (Eddie Vox’s “In My House” and his own “On This Dance Floor”) for a spiritual effect very much in the classic David Morales and Frankie Knuckles tradition but mixed to current standards of emphasis, with pause breaks, riff loops, EQ tweaks, and volume-knob booming. All that was missing was for Mitchell to come onto the dance floor and sing his own vocal — he’s done that before, and he loves mixing with his fans. Dancing instead in the DJ booth, he mixed his music with more edge and power than ever; it was the best set by a Boston DJ I’ve witnessed since DJ Manolo left for Philadelphia two years ago.
Then DJ Peter Rauhofer took over for another three hours. Rauhofer is one of house’s avatars, and his spin at Rise filled both dance floors to capacity. It was dark and steamy, and so was his music. His style has evolved. Gone were the flirty, girly, burlesque-like voices and twirly rhythms that made his four Live at the Roxy (Star 69) CD sets so irresistible. At Rise, he played the macho style of hard beats and pause breaks that today’s dance floors demand.
At first his cuts and pauses sounded much like those in Mitchell’s set, not surprising given that Rauhofer’s new I Love Miami (Star 69) two-disc set includes Mitchell’s “On This Dance Floor.” But soon enough he was blending two entirely different styles of house, hard-beat tracks like Cytric’s “This Is the Night” with a lot of electro stuff (Starkillers’ big hit “Discoteka,” Kobbe & Austin Leeds’s “We Play House,” Scratch Massive’s “Girls on Top,” and the Cube Guys’ mix of “Elektro”), moving back and forth between the two styles so smoothly that the dancers moved with him.
Usually hard-beat house and electro draw different types of fans: body-builder guys love the hard beat, electro is favored by the fashion crowd, Europeans in particular. Rauhofer attracted both types to his set, and his blend of opposites kept both moving. As for the old Rauhofer, touches were heard in his “tribal” tracks — cuts like Michael Kaiser’s “Re-drop.”
I Love Miami also includes Ame’s big minimal hit “Rej,” DJ Pierre’s acid-house club favorite “Destroy This Track,” and two spacy mixes by Danish electronica star Trentemoeller, all of them very unlike the grounded textures of the Live at the Roxy sets. This new Rauhofer sounds more like Ibiza than NYC. Yet earlier this year, his I Love New York (Star 69) two-disc set offered plenty of earthy stuff — Nick & Danny Chatelain’s “Is Killing Me,” Rosko’s “Love Is a Drug,” Holmes Ives’s “8 Killers,” and Club 69 featuring Kim Cooper’s “I Look Good.” But as Rauhofer fans at Rise found out, the one-time queen of girly house is an aspiring king of muscle music.
