With our recent forays into the Hamburg house sound, we at THEMA think it should come as no surprise for our fans to see us moving on up and enlisting other well-recognized names from that small scene. We’ve been keeping it diverse recently by looking to Detroit, France and the UK for other vibes, but we have to say that with the seductive sound of Hamburg getting bigger by the minute there’s few who earn higher marks on that list than Christopher Rau. He’s already garnered strong support from our friends over at Smallville, but we can’t overlook his contributions to the mysterious Giegling imprint as well as smart drops on Anton Zap’s Ethereal Sound and DJ Koze’s Pampa. Of course good position and good releases don’t always go hand in hand, but we’ve been finding it difficult to stop listening to his stuff for some time now. We don’t know if it’s that deep and urbane European house sound that has us so seduced or whether it’s his smart beat work that keeps us coming back, but for his North American debut here at THEMA he’s brought the heat once again with a clutch of harder-hitting head nodders that we’re confident will keep the decks spinning for some time to come. It gets started with “Spring Loop”, a track that looks to its name both for feeling and production sense. Of course that sensuous vocal sample that gets drawn through it wouldn’t do the job on its own, but Rau knows that too and surrounds it with a warm, humid bassline and his always changing and snapping drums to keep it in the pocket for the whole 5 minutes. Even though the groove on the A1 is already heavy for him, he goes deeper yet with “Swearing (Vinyl Version)” That Jamaican vocal is something so classic that we won’t spoil it here, but the pumping house beat and piano stabs he winds around it give even more poignancy to the lyrical substance…