Reona is a tap dancer, metal percussionist, improviser, choreographer and composer based in Tokyo, who came up in the Japanese free jazz and free improvisation scene and plays constantly, as often in other people's groups as in her own. Her sound starts in the legs but uses the whole body: arms, hands, mouth. Stomp, scratch, strike, blow, groan.
For this first album on Kou Records she loaded her van in the first days of 2026 and drove to Studio Dede in Tokyo with her tap shoes, a wooden platform built by the furniture maker Dada in Higashikawa (Hokkaido), tap plates cut by a Sapporo metalworker, and a heap of objects: a festival bell, a stainless steel bowl from a junk shop in Yokosuka, a transport company signboard, a Taiwanese oil pot, South Indian meal plates, basins, chains, nets, a toy drum, a loudspeaker, and two signboards from Okinawa, one of them used during the disposal of unexploded bombs.
Randall Dunn recorded and mixed the sessions on 3 and 4 January, setting the room up to capture a body moving through it rather than a drum kit in a booth. Tap has a century of vocabulary, but almost none of it was written for chains, steel and a loudspeaker, and the record sounds like nothing else. On 'M108' she is joined by Atsuo, drummer of Boris. Cover painting by Kazuki Tomokawa.