Katie (JP)

Kate Takada - AKA Katie - has never been far from water in motion. Born near the Edogawa River in Tokyo, she is now making waves just inland from the North Sea. It is perhaps no surprise then, that a certain fluidity characterises the musical world offered up by seeing and hearing Katie in action. Whether easing listeners through floaty morning-show material on the radio, or traversing different shades of dancefloor-ready cuts in the club, a Katie set flows like water: moods and grooves mixed with precision and propulsion, and an energy that constantly take us to the cusp of something new. When behind the decks in the club, Katie will often draw for sounds percolating somewhere across the spectrum of house-leaning electronic music, but her influences stretch far beyond the four-to-the-floor. Having grown up on a sonic diet of funk and soul, she has always been drawn to bold basslines and the kind of memorable vocal work characterising disco, synth-pop, italo, the deepest of deep house, and more. The futuristic polish of italo-disco aesthetics even finds natural companionship in the sleek electro cuts that have found their way into more recent sets, which have tended towards the more electronic, but without losing any of the bounce. All that is to say: machine music crafted soulfully to make bodies bump and hearts swell.
Having emerged from the claustrophobia of COVID-induced lockdowns with a new appetite for both club sounds, Katie began to experience the collective joy of some of Rotterdam’s more intimate and expressive dance floors, both in front of and inside the booth. Transformative dances at Bound45 were followed up with warm-up slots at the likes of MONO, Time is the New Space, and NAR, often counting local talents and close friends Mowgli, Charmaine, Yoast, and Pontoon’s own Eileen as co-conspirators. This is in addition to founding Ito Collective, an arts and cultural organisation focusing on the Asian diaspora in the Netherlands, and sharing sounds with fellow sleepyheads on her monthly Operator Radio show “Not an Early Bird”. With gigs already lined up for Blijdorp and Wildeburg festivals this summer, Katie’s capacity to create connection through sounds only seems set to spread further.