Written and Photos by Chloe Diehl
Last month at Houston’s House of Blues, inside the Bronze Peacock venue, legendary Japanese DJ Takuya Nakamura performed a set filled with surreal soundscapes and obscure samples.
Nakamura’s blend of live performance - trumpet being his choice of instrument - and electronic looping creates a fascinating environment for live experimentation. The booming speakers help to create a dreamlike sound through the live chopping of crisp drum samples. One of my favorite examples of this was when Nakamura played a rendition of Bobby Caldwell’s “What You Won’t Do For Love” that both blended a synthetic, electronic sound with live instrumentation. Nakamura’s use of the vocoder or reverb-soaked pedals when playing trumpet would be incredibly effective during tracks like these.
The scope of Nakamura’s samples is incredible, lending from Hip-Hop, Latin, Bossanova, Jazz, and Jungle. These sounds would be laid on a sonic foundation of ambient, electronic backing loops, using repetition as a means of experimenting and distorting the myriad of samples he uses during his set. These loops would feature celestial synths and thumping subwoofers that felt immersive.
The most disappointing part of this performance was outside of Nakamura’s control: the crowd. For a live DJ set, I felt underwhelmed by the crowd that attended the show. There were a handful of attendees in the crowd that really got into the music, but most stood still and watched Nakamura as if he were a painting in a museum. There were cheers here and there, but overall the energy did not meet the psychedelic and diverse array of sounds Nakamura delivered.