Tatsuya Nakatani Gong Orchestra at Garver Feed Mill

We at Tone Madison are excited to partner with Arts + Literature Laboratory, Communication Madison, and Garver Events to present renowned percussionist Tatsuya Nakatani and his extraordinary Gong Orchestra project. Nakatani has spent about 30 years tirelessly collaborating, touring, and developing his solo work in the worlds of avant-garde and improvised music. He’s developed a wholly distinctive vocabulary of techniques, textures, and harmonics. To see one of Naktani’s solo performances is to see an artist marshal that vocabulary into masterful, thrilling improvisations, using drumkit, gongs, singing bowls, bows, and even breath. It’s different every time, but Nakatani always gives his audience a new appreciation for both the physical heft of percussion and its capacity for delicate, ethereal sound.

Nakatani has played solo in Madison many times over the years, but a stop on one of his Gong Orchestra tours is truly a special occasion. At each show, he works with a group of local players to coax subtle and powerful layers of sound from an array of gongs, using bows of Nakatani’s own making. The 2012 Taiga Records release Nakatani Gong Orchestra is an immersive document of the sonic possibilities of this project. That said, the NGO is best experienced in in-person, and here all those rumbles and ethereal harmonics will be reverberating throughout the massive space of the Garver Feed Mill Atrium. Tickets are $20 for the general public, $15 for Tone Madison Sustainers and Arts + Lit Lab members. —Scott Gordon