Ninajirachi @ SWG3, Glasgow, 21 Mar

At their best, club nights offer community and shared catharsis. Despite the increasing precarity of arts spaces in our cities, there are always places to go if you want to find that. You’ll come away remembering the tunes, but you’re just as likely to treasure the proximity to people, the warm smiles, the body heat, the togetherness.

Ninajirachi, KAVARI and Laces bring a wonderful crowd to SWG3’s TV Studio tonight, a venue that can often suffer from a lack of intimacy. The outfits, enthusiasm and easy conversation in the audience fill the room with an optimism so powerful that it lingers longer than the tinnitus the day after. It’s a pointedly queer crowd, from the group with ‘death before detransition’ stitched into their denim at bag check, to the couple in matching leather collars cuddling by the sound booth. In a climate where it feels increasingly hostile to just be queer in public, club spaces also offer a fleeting, co-created place of relative safety.

It’s fitting for a musician like Ninajirachi, whose music is hope put to disc. Her debut album, I Love My Computer, pulls from 2010s EDM nostalgia not with a 'glory days' mentality, but with the knowingly naive energy and optimism of youth. She recreates a hyperspecific world where there is possibility at your fingertips, alone in your bedroom.

After Laces’ impressively slick and dystopian tone-setter, local hero KAVARI takes over. It’s been just a few weeks since she released her XL Recordings EP, Plague Music, and her live set lives up to all the heft and destruction it contains. It’s not immediately obvious what her doom-laden approach to industrial techno has in common with an EDM star like Ninajirachi, but it clicks as her set grows wild and loose. Strains of dubstep, phonk and pop are red-lined, chewed up and spat out. Her creative flips bring that same sense of wonder and mystery. Anything is possible playing in the gaps between genres, and she reveals the endless potential of rhythm and bass with each new twisted idea. She has made the transition from gritty basement venues to huge warehouse spaces exceptionally well.

If KAVARI's set is an hour of tension and release, Ninajirachi brings instant, unrelenting joy. She appears as a silhouette, a screen of internet ephemera looping behind her. Her hands reach up in a heart symbol, and the crowd reflects it back. From the intro of London Song onwards, fittingly word-swapped to ‘Glasgow’, the room bounces. She is mic'd, and occasionally amps up the crowd up like a Peloton instructor, which is unnecessary given there's hardly a slow of movement throughout the set.

For all of the bombast and pace, there's subtlety in how her songs are retooled for the live setting, and how they combine to create a journey. It's DJing with a pop sensibility, and pop with an expert DJ mindset. The already club-ready Fuck My Computer becomes stretched and gargantuan. Breaths of air, like the trance keys on Infohazard, feel more floaty and rejuvenating.

And like that, it's 3am. The crowd spills out home or to the next party. The safe haven is dissolved for now, but you can carry that energy with you. The computer utopia is at your fingertips, until the people who live there with you can be found on the dancefloor again.