Avicii DJs sold-out show at Stage AE

How far house music has come. Once hidden away in clandestine warehouse parties, now cities like… How far house music has come. Once hidden away in clandestine warehouse parties, now cities like Pittsburgh openly welcome house DJs like the Swedish Avicii.

Avicii’s Sunday night performance at Stage AE sold out far in advance, and second-hand tickets were going for $100. The concert’s total profits will benefit House for Hunger, an organization dedicated to raising money for hunger relief through concerts. With the visibility and charitable efforts, Avicii’s dual tour with Ash Pournouri seems far from the powder-filled basement clubs of yesteryear.

The audience has drastically changed as well. Only a handful of glowing pacifiers — once a hallmark of rave culture — lit up against a backdrop of lacrosse tees and knee-high socks. A pair of LED light gloves would occasionally rise above the churning mass, but it was quickly lost in a forest of pumping fists.

The stigmatized “Techno” music with its tweaked out teenagers swapping plastic bead “kandi” was nowhere to be seen. Instead, people were here to sway beneath chest-compressing bass and glitched-out breakdowns.

Such an intense focus on the audience may seem odd, but not when the artist is — for lack of a better term — a computer jockey. This was only one of the 26 venues Avicii will play over the course of his 27-day tour.

His music and success is a tribute to the increasing interconnectedness of modern society.

A young Swede can push some remixes and a few original tracks to YouTube and build a worldwide following almost instantly. After only two years of on-and-off remixing, Avicii had his first world tour in 2010, before he was old enough to drink at the clubs he played in.

So how can a newcomer sell out a 2,400 person club like Stage AE? Maybe because house music and dubstep are not names for genres so much as synonyms for partying. Since much of the music Avicii spun was not his own, these concerts are a means of partying with people of similar music tastes.

When Avicii arrived onstage, promptly an hour after doors opened, he plunged straight into two hours of house music. There was no chit-chat, no “How are you feeling, Pittsburgh?” He didn’t speak to the audience at all.

Even CJ Townsend, the opening DJ from Columbus, Ohio, tried to humanize the digital beats with remarks like “I need everyone to completely bug out in, like, 2.2 seconds.” Townsend’s varied set included several dubstep tracks and even some fresh moombahton from Dillon Francis.

Avicii’s more limited palette of house music still managed to keep the crowd jumping. The DJ borrowed several techniques from the aggressively simplified dance music of dubstep. Gradual builds led to fist-pumping drops that plunged the strobe-lit pit into an abyss of waving hands and gyrating hips.

Unfortunately, when Avicii failed to drop a fat bassline after a predictable build, hundreds of deprived fist pumpers cursed the DJ. Not to leave his fans disappointed, Avicii worked in a proper drop only a few bars later, twice as monstrous as if to make up for the pause.

This cycle of lull, build, drop continued for most of the show, rarely deviating from Euro house standards. Avicii mixed his four original tracks into the blend, playing his enormously popular track “Levels” twice to devastating effect.

But with a nearly constant 120-130 beats per minute, the performance began to feel like an extravagant frat party. Indeed, towards the end of the performance people began screaming “Skrillex” — for Skrillex’s remix of “Levels” — as if Avicii had been hogging the iPod all night.

While any music snob can pretend that they came to the show to see the musicianship of Avicii live, the real reason was to go bananas to some incredible house music.

Whether that means grinding with a hot body, jumping and fist pumping with the bros or staring blindly into the strobe lights, club music is what every attendee makes it.

And in that regard, Pittsburgh did not disappoint.