An Evening With Nehan

Description

Nehan is a Japanese quintet of free improvisation and avant-garde rock formed around Masaki Batoh, an acupuncturist and professional musician. Their performance is initiated by a brain wave of 9 hertz emitted by a subject who has been placed in a deep meditative state. The group responds to the wave with an improvisation using gongs, tympani, tablas, and other percussion instruments, a crumhorn, a bagpipe, an oscillator, and a mellotron, passing through a musical prism that ranges from east to west, from traditional folklore to classical, including rock, jazz, and electronic music. The role of improvisation is essential in all of Masaki Batoh's musical projects. He has been interested in the rhythms of the body and the brain and sought to access the "pulsations" of brain waves to launch improvisations. For the Nehan project, Masaki Batoh invited musicians with whom he had previously had good experiences in improvisation: Futoshi Okano (Ghost, Acid Mothers Temple, The Silence), Haruo Kondo (Espvall & Batoh), and Junzo Tateiwa (Ghost), as well as Gozen, the subject of the Brain Pulse experiment, with the oscillators.