Event

Nakatani Gong Orchestra

Held in the beautiful and contemplative environment of the Taoist Studies Institute, the Nakatani Gong Orchestra promises to be an incomparable event. Audience members have described a NGO performance as entirely unlike anything they have
ever experienced before, often relating feelings of cleansing or a sort of purification after the
event.
Tatsuya Nakatani (b. 1970 Osaka, Japan) 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.
The Seattle players in the Gong Orchestra are Greg Campbell, Eveline Muller, Bill Horist, Isaac Anderson, Andrew Angell, Amber West, Benj Cameron, Eva Walker, Eric Maia, Jackie An, Meagan Angus, Chloe Wicks, Tyler Griffith, and Kevin Jalashnikov.
Dancers are Vanessa Skantze, Alan Sutherland, Douglas Ridings, Helen Thorsen, and Alex Riding.