If you had blinked you would’ve missed it. One of the upsides of living in an Australian city which manages to attract scores of quality international artists are the unpublicized and often impromtu sideshows they perform while they’re in town. The inevitable downside of course, is that you probably don’t always hear about them til its too late. Having missed my fair share of word-of-mouth, last minutes sets (*Digweed* anyone?), I made sure that on Sunday I was front row centre for Kasey Taylor’s 5HR set at one of the longest standing Melbourne after hours haunts – Qbar.

Based in Portugal but born and bred right here in Melbourne, Kasey began DJing at the young age of 13 in a little roller disco in the outback of Australia, and has never really looked back since. The founder of notable progressive house label Vapour Recordings and a number of alternate genre offspring labels, Kasey’s experience speaks for itself – and his performance similarly did not fail to impress.

A good DJ adapts to the crowd, and I’m tempted to say that the crowd at Qbar wasn’t so much there for the music as for each other. That said, Kasey was nonetheless able to fan the flames of an initially sparse dance floor into a throbbing crowd. The key ingredient? Progressive. There were sharp techy percussion lines wrapped around thick old school house bass lines, at times reminiscent of Laurent Garnier or other heralds of the detroit techno sound. Kasey made an age old progressive technique – building to a crescendo, cutting the bass, dropping it harder and with additional layers – sound both effortless and renewed.

So what is it about Kasey’s music that has won him the respect of the dance community? If you really want to know, plant your feet on the dance floor for the full duration of a Taylor set. You can talk about programming as Kasey effortlessly and subtlety changes gears from all genres of music, sucking you into his sound scape to a point where you look up all of a sudden and realise you’ve been lost in music for hours. You can talk about his astounding mixing which is so precise that you probably won’t even know whether a track is coming or going. You can talk about the fact that Kasey doesn’t compromise his sound and still remains accessible. You can talk about a lot of things but at the end of the night it all comes down to one thing: Kasey Taylor has a scary understanding of dance music.

Thus today’s lesson, kids of ITM, is to keep your ears to the ground for every indication of what could possibly turn out to be an evening of audio activation in the company of a midnight marauder like Kasey Taylor.