Chihei Hatakeyama with special guests Jordan Reyes & Paul Metzger
Presented by Drone Not Drones
Wednesday, May 25, 2022
6:30 pm Doors // 7:30 pm Show
$15 Advance General Admission // $22 At The Door
All Ages
Ticket Purchases are Final and Non-Refundable
The Parkway Theater requires Proof of COVID-19 Vaccination or Negative Test Result for entry to all events.
An acclaimed electronic artist based in Tokyo, Chihei Hatakeyama takes audiences on a fantastical ride with "polychromes memory-evoking soundscapes" using various recorded materials of acoustic instruments such as guitars, vibraphone, and piano.
A prolific and widely respected artist, Hatakeyama's latest album, Late Spring (Gearbox 2021), is a masterful body of ambient music and has garnered praise around the globe.
Joining Hatakeyama on this rare US tour are Chicago experimental artist Jordan Reyes ("striking and appealing" — Popmatters) and Minnesota virtuoso Paul Metzger who summons the spirits of his musical Appalachian forefathers, guitarist Django Reinhardt and classical sitarist Nikhil Banerjee, weaving a peerless, highly individualistic style.
Chihei Hatakeyama is a sound artist, an organizer and mastering engineer who was born in 1978, and lives in Tokyo. He has performed for years under his given name and also as one half of the electroacoustic duo Opitope, along with Tomoyoshi Date. Hatakeyama got involved in playing music through strumming a electric guitar in a few rock-oriented bands in his teenage years. Subsequently a laptop computer superseded his bands as his main platform. Hatakeyama polychromes memory-evoking soundscapes with various recorded materials of acoustic instruments such as guitars, vibraphone, and piano; mostly played by hand and processed time and time again via laptop. His first album Minima Moralia was commissioned for release by the Chicago-based label kranky in early 2006.
Since then his many albums have been released by Room 40, Under The Spire, Hibernate Records, Magic Book Records, Home Nomal, OwnRecords, Spekk, Dronarivm, Constellation Tatsu, Glacial Movements Records and his own label White Paddy Mountain. In 2013 Hatakeyama founded the record label White Paddy Montain, which has since released over 40 recordings by some of the most accomplished musicians and modern ambient musicians, Shoegazer and folk musicians in Japan.
Recent years Hatakeyama continues to evolve his sound by analog synthesizer, modular synthesizer and compact guitar effector. Hatakeyama approaches some modular synthesizer and electric guitar drone projects with an expectation of new directions.
"…Metzger’s banjo and guitar contain multitudes. Suspended between past and future, honouring the tradition while hijacking it, listening for its voice while revelling in its inarticulacies; this is how the thing sings. And the song, in the obsessive extensions of Metzger’s instruments, truly has no ending." - The Wire
The high and lonesome cosmic hobo from the USA. Since way back when Paul Metzger has been experimenting, playing his art-guitar complete with a crash cymbal mounted to its bottom and his distinct heavily modified 23 string banjo. In 2003 he went public playing out sets of his own music, part old time strung out blues and raga’s and part deep listening compositions that wind their way through you inner ear. This is not however the limit... what he can do with his instruments live also includes clangorous, rapidly punctuated percussive workouts that blow audiences away. He pulls the listener inwards and then takes them out the backdoor to experience the other.
Tombeaux (2013) attains a new high-water mark in the career of Paul Metzger, one of North America’s greatest instrumentalists. Recorded in the dead of Minnesota winter, at home and alone, it’s the eighth Metzger release to feature his self-modified, 23-string banjo. [...] Metzger summons the spirits of his musical Appalachian forefathers, guitarist Django Reinhardt and classical sitarist Nikhil Banerjee, among others, weaving a peerless, highly individualistic style that sounds unlike anyone but himself. Metzger’s playing doesn’t imitate raga structures so much as use those modal figures as his starting point. He employs dazzling, breviloquent string plucks on the main banjo strings, whilst producing rhythmic, droning textures on the cross strings of an added bridge. Some have suggested similarities to the works of John Fahey or Sandy Bull, but Metzger’s modus operandi doesn’t constitute a mirroring of those styles; rather, he composes and operates apart from their music, in an insular and altogether separate universe. In the process, Metzger transcends and expands the lexicon in a wholly organic manner.
