He won the Disco Mixing Club (DMC) world DJ final at the age of twenty in 2002. Since then Kentaro, from Japan, has been stunning audiences worldwide with awesome displays of turntablism, and his performance in Nottingham was no exception.
As a turntablist, Kentaro doesn't merely play records; he manipulates the sounds of his vinyl, playing the decks like an actual instrument. This has been said about many other DJs before but none more accurately than Kentaro. If you have no idea what I mean then have a look for him on You-Tube.
Stealth, on Nottingham's Goldsmith St, was packed full of people willing to pay the £10 entrance fee to see Kentaro, amongst many other artists. The downstairs room was extremely busy but compared to some of Kentaro's other ventures, Friday was a pretty intimate gig: Cameras and projector screens were set up in order to make the DJ's work more visible, but most people had direct views anyway.
Kentaro's performances are as much about seeing what he's doing as hearing it. Scratching with crossed arms, spinning around and flipping the cross fader through his legs is such an example of the flair that goes into one of his shows. He is very much a performer and stimulates shouts from the crowds with his style.
Kentaro played for almost two hours, all the time scratching and mixing. The stacks of vinyl that were piling up next to him kept falling over, but even as he picked these up it had no effect on his show. He is the kind of artist who knows his instrument intimately, meaning that whatever may happen he is able to improvise.
Kentaro is on his world tour, his last British date was in Manchester on Saturday 13 October. Fans at the Nottingham gig told me he tours every four years, so your next chance to see him in Britain may be in 2011. Hopefully it'll be much sooner.
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