PascAli is a contrabass duo featuring Sean Ali and Pascal Niggenkemper that is dedicated to exploring the terra incognita of music, sound and improvisation. The “prepared” bass is a central theme and method of PascAli’s music. Augmenting their instruments with kitchenware, aluminum cans, balloons, mallets, lampshades, and almost any other kind of found object imaginable, PascAli creates entire worlds and soundscapes out of the noises their basses produce in this altered state. This unique bass duo, unique even among the tiny world of bass duos, makes music that ranges from serene contemplation to manic frenzy, invoking the sounds of space and stillness on the one hand and visceral percussiveness on the other. Liberating the bass from its traditional role as an accompaniment instrument, PascAli brings the bass into the foreground with a tireless mission of discovering and unlocking new vistas of sonic and aural experience.
Tatsuya Nakatani is a creative artist originally from Osaka, Japan. He has been residing in the USA since 1994 and is currently based in Easton, PA.Since the late 1990s, Mr. Nakatani has released over sixty recordings in the USA and Europe and has performed countless solo percussion concerts through intensive touring. He has also collaborated with hundreds of other artists internationally and presented masterclasses, workshops and lectures across the USA and around the world.
Nakatani’s approach to music is visceral, non-linear and intuitively primitive, expressing an unusually strong spirit while avoiding any categorization. He creates sound via both traditional and extended percussion techniques, utilizing drums, bowed gongs, cymbals, singing bowls, metal objects and bells, as well as various sticks, kitchen tools and homemade bows, all of which manifest in an intense and organic music that represents a very personal sonic world. His approach is steeped in the sensibilities of free improvisation, experimental music, jazz, rock, and noise, and yet retains the sense of space and quiet beauty found in traditional Japanese folk music. His percussion instruments can imitate the sounds of a trumpet, a stringed instrument or an electronic device to the extent that it becomes difficult to recognize the source of the sound. He has devoted himself to a musical aesthetic where rhythm gives way to pulse, often in a way that is not always audible or visible, in currents that incorporate silence and texture.Nakatani’s primary music activities include solo percussion performance, N.G.O. (Nakatani Gong Orchestra) and collaborations with musicians and dancers both in live performance and recordings.
Tatsuya Nakatani has spent the past decade traveling and performing extensively throughout the United States and beyond. His constant touring fosters the raw and fresh quality in his music, which can only survive through an open willingness to share energy, culture, music and self on a global human scale. He has toured and performed in Japan, China, Canada, Mexico, France, Germany, England, Scotland, Belgium, Netherlands, Portugal, Poland,Ukraine, Denmark, Sweden, Norway, Argentina, Chile, Israel and across the USA, coast to coast. While touring, he also conducts master classes and workshops at schools and universities, emphasizing his unique musical approach and philosophy.
Nakatani has performed in all sorts of venues worldwide, from international musicfestivals to local community centers, artist lofts to university concert halls, including a recent performance at the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C. He values and appreciatesgrass-roots organized shows set up and promoted by local musicians and promoters in all types of settings. Nakatani also heads his own H&H Production, Nakatani-Kobo an independent record label and private recording studio based in Easton, Pennsylvania.
