Koki Nakano

Pre-choreographed Koki Nakano

Koki Nakano has spent time in the worlds of both classical music and electro-rock (with his band Gas Law). After training at the prestigious Toho Gakuen music school and the Tokyo University of the Arts, he embarked on his career with the strength and serenity of a man who had already ditched all those qualms about identity and heritage that often hobble young musicians.

It was back in 2016 that Koki Nakano first came to the attention of those who hunger for the wondrous and unprecedented. The nine pieces on his first album Lift, recorded for Nø Førmat! with help from cellist and admirer Vincent Segal, revealed a composer of singular talents. His work displayed a subtle versatility, a high-wire delight in floating above established musical genres. The title of the album evokes a move well-known to ballet dancers: the porté, and conveys the deep relationship, both physical and spiritual, that Koki's music maintains with dance, a bond he's been cultivating ever since he moved to Paris in 2015.

Pre-Choreographed is the sequel to that beautiful opening chapter, a new episode in Nø Førmat's adventures with the emancipated genii of the piano, which began fifteen years ago with the release of Chilly Gonzales's classic Solo Piano. This project evokes the strong "saudade" for the era when the music and the dance were very close to each other, when they used to function congenially in the society. It also means the state of the music such as "awaiting" or even "missing" the choreography. That is to say, the character of the music is yet very "raw", no direction is given.

Koki Nakano's basic intention resides in the urge to re-transcribe the intimate topography of a man's life, whilst remaining deliberately detached from fashions, slogans, from a binary vision of the history of music in which modernity and past, avant-garde and classicism, new and old stand in opposition to each other as a matter of principle. For that reason, his creations never emit the dusty odour of schools and lecture halls, or the perfumed incense of chapels.