Takuya Nakamura

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There is a specific disappointment in loving dance music and slowly realising how little of it is warm. Everything is engineered, precise, slightly airless. Then a live horn lands over a breakbeat and the whole thing swings, and you remember what you were missing. The drums underneath are fast and faintly paranoid, the horn is warm and lands a half-step late, and instead of fighting each other they lean together. Almost nothing else in electronic music swings like that. The crowd is always split in a way that is fun to watch: half of them came for the drum programming, half followed a jazz musician into a room they would never otherwise enter, and both groups spend the night quietly surprised by the other half. India Street in Little Italy, which is an extremely ordinary block on which to find any of this happening. The room is small enough that late arrivals are conspicuous, so the people who care turn up early and stand close, and within ten minutes you can tell exactly who came for which half of the bill.