Tatsuya Nakatani’s Gong Orchestra

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 toured all over the world. Nakatani has developed his own unique instrumentation and extended techniques, creating new sounds utilizing gongs, drums, cymbals, singing bowls, 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 retaining the traditional sense of space, depth and deep time found in Japanese art. 

The Nakatani Gong Orchestra is a mobile community engagement project and sound art performance outlet 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. The rich harmonies produced from multiple layers of bowed gongs are transformative, engaging and inspiring for both players and audiences.

Nakatani will open up the evening with a solo set.