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BACK IN THE BOOTH
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Last Saturday night, DJ Manolo returned to the turntables at Avalon, where as resident house-music spinner he built up a large loyal following that made the club Boston’s most popular dance spot. That following remains, though not quite so large after a three-year absence, and his two sets proved him worthy, and more than worthy. The first was the most energetic, pressure-pointed, rhythmically intense performance I have ever witnessed a Boston-based house-music DJ deliver. His song selection verged as far into the weird as that of Danny Tenaglia; similarly, in his signature song, "Close Your Eyes," his own voice, distorted into a kind of blissed-out basso profundo, coaxed the dancer in the manner of Tenaglia’s big hit "Elements." And his overlay mixes packed as much power as those of Lee Burridge. His beats were very hard, like the stomp rhythms of Carl Cox (Manolo, a huge, round-headed bald man, even looked like Cox). As for sonic basics, he relied on the coolly sweet, dreamy melodicism and spacy female vocals that define Italian trance and dominate the "Ibiza sound." At Avalon, he wielded these fundamentals of house’s dark ecstatic vision over and over, pushing, goading, thumping, screaming the dancers over the edge. It took a while for Manolo’s following to move off the walls and dance to this fantastical business, but by midnight, when it was almost time for his second set to begin, the floor was fairly well packed. Now he unveiled his quick-cut style, jumping from the beat of one record to the rhythm of another, and he tweaked his soundboard’s fader and volume knobs back and forth, cutting songs in pieces, piling rhythm upon rhythm and remaking sonic textures from smooth into crisp, from buzzsaw into beatbox. Other house-music DJs use the quick-cut mix to this end, but none uses it as musically as Manolo. He strengthened the music instead of merely editing it. Yet his second set did not rise to the same level. It started out as a diva-style vocal performance in the manner of David Morales but quickly changed back to a much too free-form version of his first set. Manolo’s music lacks the sense of humor that allows DJ Steve Lawler, for example, to go free-form. Indeed, the very seriousness of his mixes creates that bugaboo of intense segues, the difficulty of exiting gracefully from a progression that keeps ratcheting up the rhythmic pressure. The standard solution is to stop the music (DJs call this a "silence break") and start all over again with a low-intensity, sonically fragile, sweet soul track. Manolo’s silence breaks led simply to further free-forming, or to hard, Carl Cox–ish rhythms that felt too bold for a beginning. Still, few Boston-based DJs have the breadth of command, of mix technique and sound dynamics, that he showed even when his segues didn’t quite compute. He gambled, and his gambles were almost always worth lots of dancer attention.
BY MICHAEL FREEDBERG
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