Tatsuya Nakatani (percussion) with Michel Doneda (saxophone)

Tatsuya Nakatani is a creative artist / percussionist originally from Osaka, Japan who has released over sixty recordings in North America and Europe. Residing in the USA since 1994 he has performed countless solo percussion concerts and has collaborated with hundreds of artists in international music festivals, university concert halls, art museums and galleries. His latest project is the Nakatani Gong Orchestra, which builds community ensembles performing on multiple bowed gongs under his direction, as recently presented at the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C. He has created his own instrumentation, effectively inventing many instruments and extended techniques. He utilizes drums, gongs, cymbals, singing bowls, metal objects, bells, and various sticks and bows to create an intense, intuitively primitive, expressive music of unusually strong spirit that defies category or genre. His music is based in improvised/ experimental music, jazz, free jazz, rock, and noise, yet retains the sense of space and beauty found in traditional Japanese folk music.

Over the years, Michel Doneda (b. 1954) has developed one of the most extensive musical vocabularies in free improvisation. A specialist of the soprano saxophone, he has gradually moved from left-field jazz to the fringes of free improv ever since he began to lead his own sessions in the early ‘80s. Doneda made his first musical steps at age 15 in his hometown’s wind band. He spent the next decade playing in dance and jazz bands, all the while keeping an eye on the French avant-garde, especially the activities of American expatriates like Steve Lacy and Alan Silva. In 1980, now based in Toulouse (Southern France), he formed his first group, Hic et Nunc, with Steve Robbins and Didier Masmalet, a trio that remained unrecorded. Around the same time, he got involved with street theater, co-founding the Institut de Recherches et d’Échanges Artistiques. Creative popular expression and exchanges with street performers, actors, and poets have remained one of his main interests, particularly throughout the ‘80s. (excerpt from artist biography by François Couture)

Justin Sherburn and his Montopolis Chamber Ensemble

“Monolith” is the latest project by composer Justin Sherburn and his Montopolis Chamber Ensemble. Sherburn will be joined by renowned pedal steel guitarist Bob Hoffnar, Henna Chou (cello), Corrine Zappler (viola), and Phil Davidson (violin) to present his most recent work, a musical suite inspired by the Central Texas landmark known as Enchanted Rock. Minimalist arrangements for string trio, pedal steel, and piano evoke the sheer mass and magnificence of the southwestern landscape. Western themes are slowed to a geologic tempo and wrapped in layers of slowly morphing harmony, paying homage to the mythological and the sacred. Field recordings taken at the site itself are woven into the compositions and complete this sonic tribute to Enchanted Rock.

Thing I Said I’d Never Be By Tim Feeney
As interpreted by Sean Harvey

Things I Said I’d Never Be was composed for Aaron Levy, Aaron Michael Butler, Clara Warnaar, Robby Bowen, and Sean Harvey in October of 2014. The piece explores austere combinations of sound and silence created over a long period of time with transducers attached to acoustic instruments.

Sean Harvey is a percussionist based in Austin, TX with a deep interest in creating and interpreting new music. He has performed with So Percussion, Line Upon Line, Thomas Burritt, Gordon Stout, Tim Feeney, Doug Perkins and others. He is founding a member of The Kraken Quartet, a percussion band that merges influences of rock, experimentalism, and minimalism. To date the group has released 3 EPs of commissioned and original music, and has performed in cities across the Northeast and Midwest. Sean is also a member of Hear No Evil, a contemporary ensemble committed to providing live, multi-media shows in the greater Austin area. The group is currently in its first season, and will be recording its first sounds at the end of this year.

In addition to his work in contemporary music, Sean has performed with The Chamber Orchestra of San Antonio, Conspirare, and the Victoria Bach Festival orchestra. He is also a percussion teacher in schools around the greater Austin area. Sean holds degrees from Ithaca College and The University of Texas. 

Composer/performer Tim Feeney seeks to explore and examine the possibilities inherent in unstable sound and duration. Tim began working in this thread in 2002 within Boston’s timbral improvising community, a group of musicians interested in austere combinations of sounds and silences, and has since performed and recorded with musicians throughout the United States and abroad. He frequently collaborates with artists including the trio Meridian, with percussionists Sarah Hennies and Greg Stuart, pianist Annie Lewandowski, cellist and electronic musician Vic Rawlings, vocalist Ken Ueno, saxophonist Andrew Raffo Dewar, banjo and electronic musician Holland Hopson, trumpeter Nate Wooley, sound artists Jed Speare and Ernst Karel, saxophonist Jack Wright, and many others.

KNEST is the lovechild of Thor Harris (Thor and Friends/Swans/Shearwater), Randall Holt (Dead.Cat.Cello/Reverend Glasseye), and Jonathan Horne (Plutonium Farmers/Young Mothers/White Denim). Drawing on their varied backgrounds, this trio of multi-instrumentalists approaches music from an improv-based series of landscapes and motifs that develop organically. The instrumentation is just as interesting as their stage presence – including hammered dulcimer, xylophone, KAOScillator, guitar, saxophone(s), cello, upright bass, trumpet, clarinet, and flute. Sounds of experimental jazz, post-rock, noise, and classical can be expected from these gentlemen. KNEST currently resides in Austin, TX.
– https://www.facebook.com/knestatx/?fref=ts