The booth at the Late Room faces a wall. This is not an accident of architecture; the wall was built in 2019, at the request of three residents, and Balogun was one of them.
"You can't read a room and play to it at the same time," she says. "One of those is a job for a promoter." She has been making this argument for a decade, and it has not become more popular.
If I can see them, I start giving them what they already want. That is the opposite of the job.
What she plays instead is a set built almost entirely in advance — not a fixed sequence, but a set of routes through about four hundred records, decided in the week before and rehearsed in a garage in Govan.
The rehearsals are the part nobody believes. Six hours, alone, standing up, in a room with the same rig she will use on the night, playing to nobody.
People think improvisation means unprepared. It means the preparation was of a different kind.
The eleven appearances here are not a residency. She has turned down a residency twice, on the grounds that a monthly booking would force her to make a set out of whatever she had that month.