Monday April 6 * doors at 6:30, music at 7 * $15-25 * TICKETS

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.

Shelly Purdy is a contemporary percussionist and teaching artist committed to presenting new and experimental music. Her sonic explorations tend to favor the mingling of found objects with more traditional instruments and an affinity for chance and improvisation whenever possible. Purdy regularly performs with such ensembles as the percussion quartet; Umbilicus, the science/music ensemble; The Inverse Square Trio, and the avant/jazz trio; The Compositions. Purdy also has been studying Javanese & Balinese Gamelan under the tutelage of Prof Gina Beck and is a board member for The High Zero Foundation and 2640 Collective.