Sveta Ilyinova's Five Six-Minute Sets, Ranked by Tempo, Tape and When the Floor Fills

The pear-shaped kitchen timer goes off at 12:46 and Sveta Ilyinova lifts both hands off the mixer like someone letting go of a hot pan. Six minutes. Nobody claps. They are busy putting their hands back in their coat pockets. It is 7 degrees in the courtyard behind Lamazi Bakery in Sololaki, and the north wall still holds last night's frost.

She plays six minutes at a time. Never five, never seven. Today she played six sets between noon and four, with tea in between, and I stood by the drain cover with a notebook. Five are ranked below. The sixth is explained at the end.

The rules. Tempo is counted against my watch, because the drum machine's display is missing a segment and a 3 looks like a 5. Tape is how many times she bounces the kick through her quarter-inch machine. I judge the passes by how round the front of the click gets. The floor fills when more than ten people stand on the cobbles. The courtyard holds about forty.

5. Set one, 12:40, 126 BPM. One pass through tape, barely warm. The kick sounds like a good idea somebody is still having. The hat is a tin sugar bowl she recorded with a spoon. The floor fills at 5:40, and only because a man with a thermos wanders to the middle to look for his lighter and eight people follow him. It is a warm-up and it knows it. I love it.

4. Set two, 1:20, 129 BPM. Two passes. The top of the kick has started to lose its corners, like a stair that a lot of feet have used. A woman in a green quilted coat nods on the off-beat for the first minute and is corrected by her friend at 1:30. The floor fills at 4:15. Sveta drops the hat for eight bars at 3:50 and you can hear the whole courtyard lean forward.

3. Set three, 2:00, 132 BPM. Three passes. The kick tail goes brown, like toast left on a radiator. Somebody on the second balcony stops hanging laundry at minute two and just holds a wet sock. The floor fills at 3:05, led by two bakery apprentices in flour-white clogs who dance as if the ground is slightly too hot. This is the first set where the mixer's cheap fader makes a scratch at 4:20 and she turns it into a snare. Nobody else notices. I have never respected a fader more.

2. Set four, 2:40, 134 BPM. Four passes, and the machine is audibly tired. Tape hiss rises under the kick like a kettle starting. At 3:10 there is a click from a splice in the reel, and she keeps it, locks the whole groove to it, and the click becomes the third drum. The floor fills at 2:05. A man in a flat cap who has not moved all afternoon takes off the cap, holds it to his chest and starts stamping. I have scored this set a 9 for tape alone.

1. Set five, 3:20, 138 BPM. One pass. Only one, but she runs the level hot at 15 inches per second until the kick leans into the red and the tape squashes it flat and fat, a sound like a fist wrapped in a wool hat. She opens with the kick alone for forty seconds. At 0:48 the floor is full. Nobody was asked. A child's bicycle was parked against the wall and the whole bike hums on the second beat. The sun leaves the courtyard at 3:50, and this set got there first by thirty minutes.

The fastest set on the day is also the quickest to fill the floor, which is the opposite of what a sensible person would predict, and Sveta shrugs when I mention it. 'If the kick is right, the speed is just how soon you hear it again,' she says. She is winding the reel back by hand, with her tongue between her teeth.

Set six, 4:00. Unranked. The timer's spring sticks in the cold and it rings at 6:40, not 6:00. Sveta says a set that runs long is not a set, it is an accident. The floor was full from the first bar. The light was gone, the stones were dark and slippery, and the kick was about 140 and two passes of something I can only call weather.

At 4:07 the baker from Lamazi came out of the back door with a tray of walnut bread, still too hot to touch. The floor emptied in eleven seconds. Walnut bread beats 140 BPM.