Sitting at a drum set, Tatsuya Nakatani lays a series of small cymbals and “singing bowls” on his snare drums. He moves with speed and fluidity, striking the bowls and cymbals with various sticks or running a long, hand-crafted bow against them to elicit droning tones. With the bowls dashed to the side, he scrapes the edge of a flexible cymbal on the snare drum. The sound of scraping metal rings out and is silenced. Nakatani places the cymbal flat on the drum head, leans over to place his lips on it and blows. The sound is like an elephant in agony: visceral, primitive, piercing.
If this doesn’t sound at all musical, that’s because it isn’t — not in any conventional sense. Nakatani strips away the pleasant, recognizable aesthetics of music and produces something as emotional as it is challenging to listen to.
The sounds Nakatani draws out of his percussion instruments are harsh, cacophonous and dissonant. They build and layer, with each strike of the smaller instruments triggering a reaction from the bass and snare drums. The wall of sounds ebbs and flows, at times reduced to the soft wail of Nakatani’s bow against a large gong. This is music you feel through your entire body — music experienced best in live performance.
At times, Nakatani is joined by multi-instrumentalist Mike Gangloff on gongs or hurdy gurdy, a crank-powered medieval instrument. The hurdy gurdy adds another layer of drone to the complex, textured sound. Gangloff also performs solo on a fiddle, showcasing complex arrangements of traditional-sounding music and incorporating humming and unaccompanied singing. His energy and focus while playing is extraordinary. Similarly, as percussion music varies in intensity, the men go from sitting to standing, moving with almost manic energy to keep up with one another.
It bears repeating that this music is challenging. On the surface it sounds a lot like noise, and picking out harmonies, emotions or melodies from the dissonance is not always easy. When approached with an open mind, however, this avant-garde collage of sounds can become positively transcendent.
Opening act Errantry, the stage name of Scott Ritchie, worked as a perfect lead-in to Nakatani and Gangloff. Errantry starts off with electronic drones. He builds them up until he introduces electric guitar loops, which he plays live. Though more clearly melodic than that of the other performers, Errantry’s music is still incredibly complex and richly layered, filled with textured harmonies. The dynamic and instrumental progressions throughout his 25 minute piece almost felt narrative, building to a tremendous crescendo before decaying and fading back to the initial drone. Ritchie performs around Charlottesville with other bands and as a soloist, and his experimental sound is definitely something to experience.
Twisted Branch Tea Bazaar is an excellent venue for seeing these sorts of performers — an intimate venue with various places to sit and consistently strong acoustics. All three musicians took full advantage of the space, making it reverberate with drones.
There are few sounds more objectively unmusical than scraping metal on metal. Tatsuya Nakatani manages to find almost every one of them — yet he somehow transforms them into a profound musical experience.
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