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During that part of his set, Rise’s dance floor was packed with bodies. Guys stripped to the waist; guys in T-shirts and do-rags; gals wearing Capri pants and Keds. Hairdos were flopping in the dark, misty air; sweat was steaming. It was a classic disco night, almost too rehearsed, yet full of jumps, shouts, and twirls. Later, about 5 a.m., the dancers thinned; only the truly intoxicated continued. And got lucky, for it was now, evidently deciding that he had lost track of the dancers, that Manolo began to do all kinds of numbers on his own music. He cued up one beat track after another, mixed them rapidly, shifted through them, put this vocal drop-in onto the music and then another, some of them truly tipsy, which is how a dancer should be in the wee hours. Manolo, meanwhile, was whipping his beats, kicking the rhythms almost angrily, scolding them the way I’d seen drummer Jo Jones do back in the days. This was hard-hop disco, but slick with a kind of Kansas City swing-band polish that wanted only a roomful of poshly garbed dancers to respond to its ad lib insults and free-form temper tantrums.

Manolo didn’t want it to end. Even when the light-show gal put on her coat and made it plain that she was going home, he would not stop the music. There were scarcely a dozen dancers left, and he was going to keep them dancing, grinning, growling. But then the music did end. The dancers cheered and gave Manolo a round of applause. He moved among them, hugging them all. They hugged him back, just as, at the beginning of his set, when the change of music alerted them that he had replaced the warm-up DJ, they’d stopped to applaud. Now it was over. He gathered up his bag of 12-inch discs — all 60 of them — and his notebook full of remixed CDs, went to his car, and off we drove, in the warm sunny dawn, back to the exurbs and roadway life.

IT’S A MONTH LATER, and Manolo has settled in Philadelphia and set up his in-house studio. From there, he’s been venturing into New York and the big time. I tell him he can’t miss. "I hope so," he says. "It’s time." Indeed it is. It’s been quite a while now since Manolo came to the US, as a child, from his home in Galicia, near Santiago de Compostela. It’s been many years since he started going to bars as a self-described "rock guy," where he surprised himself by hearing his first DJ. "That’s what I wanted to do!" he exclaims, as if he’d just found this out a minute ago. "So I started practicing, in my basement, with two turntables. Creating my own mix tapes. Then I started playing, in small bars." It sounds familiar. But unlike far too many DJs who live only for the late night, Manolo lived a real life. He got married; he has a baby; he owned a house and will buy one in Philadelphia.

The DJ who lives a daytime life eventually runs out of time. Manolo stayed up all day in preparation for the set at Rise, a day that began with him closing the sale of his house, hardly a musical paradigm. He had told me he was going to nap after the closing, but he couldn’t; he had to rehearse. A DJ who takes only 60 records to a three-hours-plus set had better know the music in them intimately. There’s no time to be searching a 10-minute record for the right mix point; you have to know where it is. Also, with only 60 discs, if the music takes too sweeping a detour, you run out of selection choice; only your mix skill replenishes the music. So you have to rehearse, and rehearse some more. Sleep can wait.

Manolo looks tired at the end of his Rise set. I can see it in his eyes. He’s not yet 40, but he must be feeling like it. All the master house-music DJs whose music and craft we talk about — Little Louie Vega, Tony Humphries, Peter Rauhofer, Ibiza’s DJ Pippi, David Morales, Junior Vasquez, "Danny," Carl Cox — are 40 years old, and some are 50, a few more than 50. They’ve been turntabling for decades, midnight to dawn and beyond. Most must be very tired indeed. More tired still are the younger guys whom Manolo likes — Junior Jack, Wally Lopez, Krameria, Paul Van Dyk, Jonathan Peters. They rehearse, they perform, they record; they fly all over the world as a major pop stars. Yet house music sings sweetest when it’s tired. House is a dark beat, a bruised melody; it’s a gospel howl, a diva’s cry, a groan of pleasure, a guy’s swoon, all of it exhausted, emotionally and physically spent, sustained by its extended mixes, in which are stored its hope, its ambition, its faith. No other pop music, not even the soul music whence it arose, expresses the exhausted self the way house does. It’s the music of eyes bloodshot and stomachs aching, a non-stop awakeness in search of romance or redemption or stress unstressed or all of these. Manolo doesn’t live only in the howling, swooning zone, but he does live in house music’s exhausted state.

And yet . . . he goes refreshed to Philadelphia. Boston will in fact hear him again: "Avalon’s going to fly me up here to do my monthly gig there." But the days of being resident in Boston are over for Manolo. At least for now. The skyscrapers are taller where he’s going, and more numerous; and the valleys in which house music germinates are deeper, and thicker on the ground.

DJ Manolo spins next Saturday, July 3, at Avalon, 15 Lansdowne Street in Boston; call (617) 262-2424.