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Akihiko takes him to a festival at the Hague.
Trance runs a rate of 150 bpm, enough to jumble his nerve endings and rip into the theory notes tattooed onto his childhood memories. He doesn't do any drugs but Akihiko partakes liberally; he's perhaps the only sober person within a two-kilometre radius, in fact. Later the MDMA blossoms & lights up the brittle joints connecting Akihiko's fingers to his hip. Probably there's a love language baked somewhere into this gesture.
"I think we should break up," he remembers saying out loud then. His words dissolve into 150 bpm around them.
He dates an electronic music producer sometime thereafter—practically a foray into uncharted waters. His new boyfriend has nice abs and an apartment free of coffee mugs. I'm an old fan of your work, Ugetsu-san, he says as he cracks open a track on his DAWless setup. Each filter applied to the sine wave grows the oscillation at a thrilling angle, heats up several degrees shy of 150 bpm. For a composition in common time, it's remarkably organic. Analog sound is warm. Warm in a way that loving Akihiko never was.
At the end of the song, he realizes as much.