The Cave at Chinese Laundry was the perfect location for a Nathan Fake live set. Dark and sparsely decorated, the room basically commands you to dance, while the low ceiling, engulfing sound and minimal lighting mean that there's nothing to distract you from the subtle complexities of the music. And even if not everyone in the comfortably busy room necessarily knows the headliner's back catalogue, they are all ready to be educated.
Club Junque was on warm-up duties and set the pace nicely, laying down a set of deep, warm tech house and progressive. Opening with "Paean," Nathan Fake made an emphatic statement about what to expect from his set: complex, up-tempo rhythms, crunchy beats, live experimentation and edits, and of course his trademark way of making melodies out of non-melodic sounds. Throughout the set, his more recent influences from bass music were readily apparent, with his formerly straight, slamming four-to-the-floor grooves replaced with shuffly, swinging beats and choppy percussion, and his melodies taking on a slightly more organic, free-flowing feel. Plenty of tracks from Steam Days received a run, including "Iceni Strings" and "Neketona," as well as crowd favourites such as "Fetinger," "Outhouse" and of course "The Sky Was Pink," all of which received a thorough live reworking, making them sound almost like new tracks at times—the dubstep breakdown during "The Sky Was Pink" was especially epic.
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