Nava Dunkelman is a percussionist and improviser based in Brooklyn, NY. Born in Tokyo, Japan and raised in a multi-cultural environment by an American father and Indonesian mother. Her musical approach is innovative and dynamic, combining virtuosity and intuition. Meticulous in an intrinsic way, she uses her distinctive sound palette to explore and give life to a vast spectrum of musical possibilities. Nava’s current projects are electro-percussion experimental noise duo IMA with Amma Ateria, and percussion duo NOMON with her sister Shayna Dunkelman. She also has performed and collaborated with Fred Frith, John Zorn, William Winant, Ikue Mori, Pauchi Sasaki, Angélica Negrón, gabby fluke-mogul, Brandon Seabrook, Du Yun, and many others. She has performed classical and contemporary pieces with the William Winant Percussion Group, Joan Jeanrenaud, Raven Chacon, San Francisco Girls Chorus, San Francisco Contemporary Music Players and others.

ÉMU aka Maria Takeuchi is a composer and audiovisual artist who creates sonic and visual poems, merging organismic soundscapes with generative art and illuminating objects inspired by nature. Using piezo microphones attached to porcelain bowls with water measurements, Maria plays and conducts the sound-objects with a delicate yet intentional focus. The subtle sound textures created by sand, dry leaves, and shells on the handmade instruments, processed with modular synthesizers for added aesthetic atmosphere.

NOMON is Shayna and Nava Dunkelman, musicians and percussionists currently based in Brooklyn, NY. After spending years apart working on their own unique voices, they came together in 2018 to form NOMON. Born and raised in Tokyo, Japan to an Indonesian mother and an American father, the sisters became multi-instrumentalists performing alongside their mother, a musician and composer active in Asia and the Middle East. They are strongly drawn to the dance-like movements and flow of playing percussion. It is as visual as it is aural. The trajectory of the hands and sticks, the shift of body weight, the eyes aiming to strike – The physicality of the performance has a choreographic quality as it is. The body follows a sequence of movements when immersed in playing the array of percussive instruments surrounding it. The music lives in the intersection of electronic soundscapes and intricately composed percussion parts. They combine drum machines, vocal samples, synth melodies and modular synthesizers triggered by analog sensors with carefully chosen percussion sounds to create a cohesive interweaving of the electronic and acoustic elements. The seamless blend of the two worlds is essential to their music.

IMA is the electro-percussion project of electronic sound artist Amma Ateria (HK) and percussionist Nava Dunkelman (JP), based in New York and California. Through restraint and release, IMA depicts expressionistic noise music of Japanese poetry with the meticulous industrial and serene. Striving for a balance between precision of instrumentation, filmic transitions between silence and densities are driven to brinks of breakage, situated by beautification in between. IMA marches forth with starkness and surrender into the aftermath of destruction, and attempt for transformative regeneration of beauty through catalysts of pleasure.