A sizzle. A roaring. The sound of massed cellos making a droning chord. Distant thunder, and a lively breeze. Give Tatsuya Nakatani’s Gong Orchestra the blindfold test, and you might hear all of these. Or you might hear something entirely different—the music is open-ended enough that each pair of ears will encounter not only the sound of Nakatani’s bowed and beaten gongs, but all the personal associations they’re capable of invoking.

Listening to a recording of Nakatani’s music in the context of the Powell Street Festival, Vancouver’s annual celebration of Japanese and Japanese-Canadian culture, these ears couldn’t help but imagine a connection with the slow rituals of the Shinto religion, Japan’s indigenous animist creed. The music also seemed to be rooted in some kind of meditation, implying a connection to the Zen Buddhist practices that, in Japan, overlie and coexist with that earlier belief system.

But those connections, Nakatani says, are entirely imaginary.

“There’s nothing about meditation or Shinto religion: it’s just about contemporary art,” the Osaka-born musician explains, checking in with the Straight from a gas station in his adopted home of Truth or Consequences, New Mexico. Speaking in lightly accented English, he notes that these are common misconceptions. “Of course, on the audience side, everybody thinks different, so with 100 people, maybe 80 people say it’s a meditative experience. Or maybe 40 people will think it’s contemporary composed music or a contemporary sound-sculpture project. Some people will say it’s a movie soundtrack for them, or poetry. It depends on the listener; it depends on the circumstances.”

There’s certainly a performance-art aspect to Nakatani’s work: wherever the Gong Orchestra travels, he enlists local musicians to perform his scores. He doesn’t specify who gets to participate; that’s determined by each city’s presenting organization. Previous experience as a percussionist isn’t necessary, and neither are sight-reading skills: Nakatani leads the band gesturally, bringing individual gongs in and out as needed.

“There is no sheet music,” the 48-year-old musician says. “There is no written format, I guess. So I usually conduct; it’s probably 50 percent improvising, 50 percent composed. I remember each gong’s sound, so I can format the music with different combinations. And also this is a very challenging project, because every time there are different members, with different abilities, different sounds, and different acoustics in different places. So I try to do the best I can at the moment. Some players don’t make good sounds, some players do make good sounds. If some player doesn’t make good sound, it’s not bad: I can use that sound as more of an effect, in a way. But I try to do my best each time. That’s my composition.

“Sometimes I record by myself; I play all gongs into Pro Tools—150 tracks of all kinds of combinations, all by myself,” he continues. “Which works very well, but it doesn’t have the live feeling. I’m focusing on the compositions, but live is live.”

And live, he stresses, is where his music is best experienced. There’s a physicality, he explains, that even high-end stereo speakers can’t reproduce.

“It’s the same with the gamelan—the metallic vibration, which is really powerful for the human body,” he says. “We kind of know about it, but we don’t know about it. It makes people smile; it makes them feel good. And these days many healer people are using sound for therapy; everything is based on the material vibration, giving particular frequencies to the treated people. So this has some element of that.”

Healing is not Nakatani’s first concern: primarily, he reiterates, he’s a composer. But if it’s possible to do formally inventive work that also promotes psychic and physical well-being, why not?

“Yes, that’s how I think,” he says, laughing. “I have to accept this second effect that will work for the people—and, I think, for myself as well. I’m very healthy. Maybe that’s why I do this project!”

The Powell Street Festival presents a Tatsuya Nakatani solo performance at the Firehall Arts Centre at 3:30 p.m. on Saturday (August 4), and the full Nakatani Gong Orchestra at the Vancouver Japanese Language School at 3:30 p.m. on Sunday (August 5).