Witching Hour

Witching Hour: DEBIT gives a lesson in cosmogony - KRUI Radio DEBIT kicked off the 2022 Witching Hour festival in Iowa City. Image via Never Apart.

This Sunday we team up with Feed Me Weird Things and Public Space One to present the NAKATANI GONG ORCHESTRA 🪐

After a solo set by Tatsuya Nakatani, a 14 piece orchestra made up entirely of Iowa City musicians will take the Englert stage to perform his gong based compositions.

------------------------------------------

Tatsuya Nakatani is an avant-garde percussionist, composer, and artist of sound. Active internationally since the 1990s, Nakatani has released over 80 recordings and tours extensively, performing over 150 concerts a year. His primary focus is his solo work and his large ensemble project, the Nakatani Gong Orchestra. He teaches master classes and lectures at universities and music conservatories around the world. Originally from Japan, he makes his home in the desert town of Truth or Consequences, New Mexico. With his activity in new music, improvisation, and experimental music, Nakatani has a long history of collaboration.

Nakatani's distinctive music centered around his adapted bowed gong, supported by an array of drums, cymbals, and singing bowls. In consort with his personally hand-carved Kobo Bows, he has spent decades refining and developing his sound as an arrangement of formations of vibrations, incorporated in shimmering layers of silence and texture. Within this contemporary work, one can still recognize the dramatic pacing, formal elegance and space (ma) felt in traditional Japanese music.