Friday September 20 * 7pm * $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.

Mark Cisneros is a Washington, DC based multi-instrumentalist, composer, and improviser whose creative output toggles between the Jazz, experimental, punk, and improvised music worlds. As a saxophonist he studied at the New School in New York City under the tutelage of such greats as Ahmed Abdullah, David Schnitter, Joe Chambers, and Tim Price. His current trio with bassist Luke Stewart and drummer Nik Francis called WE WERE HERE BEFORE just released their debut record on Catalytic Sound. He also currently plays reeds, percussion, and upright bass with Zach Barocas’ New Freedom Sound, drums in The Make-Up, and guitar in Hammered Hulls, Kid Congo and the Pink Monkey Birds, and Des Demonas.

Nik Francis is an improvising musician. His music focuses on the drum kit, often incorporating electronics and small acoustic instruments.