Tomo Nakayama

Tomo Nakayama follows his instincts. After a decade spent fronting Seattle bands Grand Hallway and Asahi, releasing four studio albums and touring constantly throughout the US and Japan, Tomo was offered an opportunity in 2013 to act and sing in Lynn Shelton’s Sundance Grand Jury nominated film “Touchy Feely”, opposite Elliot Page and Rosemarie DeWitt. Though he had no experience in front of the camera, he dove right in and found new inspiration in the process of filmmaking. He composed two songs for the film, one which he performed in the movie (The New York Times called it “the most compelling moment”), and the other which he wrote and recorded in 10 minutes on an old cassette 4 track. This brief shift in focus led to a much longer period of reflection where Tomo made the decision to walk away from the large orchestral chamber-pop ensemble in order to pursue a rawer, more spontaneously intimate and experimental sound as a solo artist. Just as he began writing what would become his debut solo album, "Fog On The Lens", Tomo was invited to a residency at Seattle’s Town Hall. Given free access to the 92 year old Roman-revival style building, Tomo decided to use the space as his own recording studio. He used the main performance hall to write and record on their Steinway grand piano. The backstage green room became an isolation booth for guitars. The long resonant hallway in the basement with its haunting reverb was used to track the vocals. All of this recording was done with one microphone plugged directly into a laptop, the same setup used in his home studio. In essence and in spirit, "Fog On The Lens" is a bedroom album created in a cathedral-sized room. Tomo embraced the literal concept of “residency”, recording alone at odd hours of the night in the empty hall, with no restrictions on time, and the freedom to wander down whatever paths the songs led him. Additional work was done on the road, in a tiny cabin in Wallace Falls, Washington, and at a small bed and breakfast in Portland, Oregon, all with the same spirit of resourcefulness and creativity necessitated by the bare-bones laptop set up. When it came time to mix the sessions, Tomo enlisted the help of producer/multi-instrumentalist Yuuki Matthews (of The Shins and Teardrops). Though it was the first time the two had made music together, Yuuki displayed an immediate and intuitive understanding of Tomo’s vision. In addition to taking the unusual step of mixing the tracks Tomo recorded onto analog 4-track cassette tape, Yuuki overdubbed his own wildly imaginative array of analog synthesizers and homemade keyboard sounds which heightened the album’s evocative, dream-like atmosphere. "Fog On The Lens" combines elements of the acoustic and electronic, analog and digital, lo-fi and hi-fi, the urban and the pastoral. The past and future collide in a beautiful, hazy collage. It bears the influence of Tomo’s favorite musicians like Arthur Russell, Bjork, Paul Simon, Cass McCombs, The Velvet Underground, and Ryuichi Sakamoto, yet exists in a world entirely of its own. "Fog On The Lens" is a quietly confident step forward from a restless soul, unafraid to follow his muse, wherever it leads him. credits