The NEPA Quartet brings together four central voices of the international improvisation scene across Berlin, Amsterdam, and Japan: Tetuzi Akiyama, Bryan Eubanks, Toshimaru Nakamura, and Gert-Jan Prins. Their first joint release, Spring, reconfigures individually recorded solos into shifting collective perspectives. In 2026, the quartet tours together for the first time, also stopping by at exploratorium. Guitar, saxophone, percussion, electronics, and controlled feedback form a shared field of interaction. Improvisation appears here as a process of continuous transformation – open, precise, and situational.
Tetuzi Akiyama is primarily recognized for his work in the field of improvisatory music. An instrument builder, guitarist, electronic musician, and organizer of monthly improv meetings at Tokyo’s Off Site, Akiyama has built a decades-long reputation as a highly sensitive and inventive musician within electro-acoustic music. On the acoustic guitar, his playing is plaintive and introspective: tones hover, charged by silence and subtly displaced within a nonlinear flow. On the electric guitar, by contrast, everything condenses into repetition and groove – a distorted, insistent pulse generating a dense, almost physical intensity.
Gert-Jan Prins has been known for over twenty years as one of the most challenging sound artists in the Netherlands. An autodidact, he focuses on the sonic and musical qualities of electronic noise. In his work, Prins establishes connections to contemporary electronic club culture, occupying a radical position in his investigation of electronic sound and its relationship to the visual. He also draws on performance and machine art of the 1980s, which reshaped the legacy of industrial society to produce encounters with technology that are at once threatening and, at times, sublime.
Toshimaru Nakamura is a Japanese musician active in free improvisation and Japanese onkyo. He began his career playing rock and roll guitar, but gradually moved toward other forms of music, eventually abandoning the instrument and working with circuit bending approaches. He uses a mixing console as a live, interactive instrument: playing the “no-input mixing board” by connecting the input of the board to its output and manipulating the resulting feedback. His music has been described as ranging from piercing high tones and shimmering whistles to heavier, crackle-spattered low-frequency patterns.
Bryan Eubanks develops his music through both solo work and collaboration. Since 1999, he has participated in numerous short- and long-term projects and regularly presents his work internationally. He is active across a range of contexts: improvisation; composing electronic and acoustic works for small ensembles, solo instruments, computers, and electronics; organizing and curating concerts; and building electronic instruments. He currently lives in Berlin.
19:00: soundwalk with Thomas Gerwin
