Tatsuya Nakatani and Friends

TATSUYA NAKATANI – ACOUSTIC SOUND ARTIST, MASTER PERCUSSIONIST

Tatsuya Nakatani is a Japanese avant garde percussionist and acoustic sound artist. Based in the United States, he has released over 80 recordings in the last two decades and tours extensively. Nakatani has developed his own unique instrumentation, creating new sounds and extended techniques. Utilizing gongs, drums, cymbals, singing bowls, his breath, wooden sticks, metal objects, and the idiosyncratic bows and mallets he handcrafts in his workshop; he sculpts an intense, intuitively primitive, expressive sound form that defies genre. His work engages improvised-experimental music and movement, while still retaining the traditional sense of space, depth and deep time found in Japanese art.

The Nakatani Gong Orchestra (NGO) is a mobile community engagement project he has developed and grown over the last decade. Nakatani organizes and conducts local ensembles in performances of his complex harmonic compositions on 15 bowed gongs. These works are site specific by nature, taking place in abandoned grain silos, viaducts and other unique architectural spaces as well as in traditional concert halls and galleries. Nakatani teaches master classes and workshops at universities, giving students an opportunity to share his unique approach and philosophy for creating visceral, non-linear, experiential sounds.