REVIEW: Takuya Nakamura @ Sonia 2/19

Photo Credit: Billie Huang

Review by Owen Butler

While not the largest major city in America, Boston draws people from all corners of the globe simply for its education. So while not a true homecoming tour stop for many artists, their time in Boston is often a return back to their collegiate roots. This is the case for Takuya Nakamura, formally trained multi-instrumentalist and electronic artist from Japan. In 1990, Nakamura moved to Boston to study jazz theory and musical composition at the New England Conservatory of Music. In recent years, his unique fusion of trumpet playing with electronic music has caught the eyes and ears of listeners of all ages. Nakamura graced Cambridge this past Thursday, February 19th, with his glorious rhythms at Sonia.

Before Nakamura’s set, Peter Devnull, known by his stage name DEV/NULL, primed the audience with an opening DJ set. He didn’t stray too far from drum and bass, although the bass at times took charge like a Lorraine James set. In an all black band-tee that we’ve all repped before, he made a castlette of the Sonia dance floor like a stage crew puppeteer. Most notably, Devnull’s use of pocket operators drove the dancing: polyrhythmic percussive breakdowns, glitchy countermelodies, and unexpected breakdowns all from his rudimentary hand-held contraptions. Although the light design didn’t need any more help, he periodically held the hand-sized device up for the audience to see the cascading light blink across the rudimentary keypad. If you squinted hard enough, you just might’ve been able to play DanceDanceRevolution with it. 

Strutting on stage, dressed more stylish than any depop reseller could dream of being, Nakamura took over the control board seamlessly, trumpet case in hand. The bass starts fluid with slower tantric tempo. As the beat switches up, he introduces his trumpet playing, dancing between beats like a ferocious game of hopscotch. The sampled Sade vocals fell like lace against his brassy playing.

The control table was set like a bacchanal for audiophiles, laid out with the guts of a ransacked Radio Shack. Wires hung off the table, wrapped like cyborg entrails. The lighting design was a synesthesiac’s dream: the simple colors meshed with the brass tone, and unblurring your eyes created a beautifully lit soundscape. The audience members ranged in both age and movement, some shuffling and side-stepping while others stood stationary, spectating. Having stayed quiet for most of the set, Nakamura says hello and begins a clicky tune with dial tone drop and pounding bass, like a callcollect from hell. Tracks were interrupted by intermittent soundbites of friends talking or movie dialogue, startlingly halting the dancers’ movements but keeping their intrigue as the next track instantly started.

The most beautiful moment of the night was during a 5-minute remix of Enya’s “Orinoco Flow (Sail Away),” accented with his trumpet playing. At the tail end of his set, Nakamura played a handful of vocally-backed tracks. One notable song was an inspiring electronic ballad about not giving up, which fit thematically for the end of an almost 2 hour set. He concluded the night by inviting everyone to a Jungle party “two blocks that way,” pointing to the west, promising more good music.

All Nakamura’s sounds are somehow so human yet so extraterrestrial. As a classically trained musician whose collaborators include Quincy Jones, A$AP Rocky, Laurie Anderson, and David Byrne, Nakamura is truly a visionary for sound. His eclectic background infuses the abstract art of electronic music with purely humanistic vitality, giving both the sound he samples and his own work new life. From saw waves and drum machine claps to dialogue between friends, no sound is safe from rebirth in a Nakamura DJ set.