Reona Reona Vinyl

In the first days of 2026, with Japan quiet in the lingering feeling of the New Year, REONA loaded her van with instruments and drove to Studio Dede, Tokyo. Tap shoes, an extension of her body. A wooden platform built by the furniture maker Dada in Higashikawa, Hokkaido, which gives her a rich sound in any room. Tap plates cut for her by Dairi, a metalworker in Sapporo. Then everything else: a festival bell, the first thing she acquired when the COVID years gave her time to think. An American stainless steel bowl found in a junk shop in Yokosuka. An old transport company signboard from the Jingisukan pot museum in Iwamizawa. A Taiwanese oil pot, South Indian meal plates, basins, chains, nets, a toy drum, a loudspeaker. And two signboards from Okinawa — one handed to her by a man who told her, please step on it; the other used during unexploded bomb disposal. "It accelerated my metallization," she says.REONA is a tap dancer, metal percussionist, improviser, choreographer, composer and designer based in Tokyo, and one of the most viscerally original sound artists working anywhere right now. Her sound impulses run straight to her legs, but the playing uses all of her — arms, hands, mouth. "Stomp, scratch, touch, strike, blow, groan, stomp and scratch."She came up in the Japanese free jazz and free improvisation scene and has hardly stopped playing since, constantly on stage, as often in somebody else's group as her own. The collaborating isn't a sideline to the practice, it's where the practice got built: years of rooms where the form is decided in the moment, with whoever is standing there. The noise came out of that rather than out of a record collection. And what she has made with it has no obvious antecedent — tap is a percussion tradition with a century of vocabulary behind it, and almost none of that vocabulary was written for chains, steel and a loudspeaker.Randall Dunn produced, recorded and mixed the album at Studio Dede on January 3 and 4, 2026, with the room set up to catch a person moving through it rather than a kit in a booth. What the record documents is not an arrangement of parts but a body workin weight shifting, metal answering, the platform reading the floor. On "M108," Atsuo, the drummer of Boris, joins her on drums and percussion.The front cover is a painting, Legend of the Snow Spirit, by legendary artist/musician Kazuki Tomokawa.REONA's own account of the session ends the way the record does — worn down, elated, still going.あゝ こすったこすったAh, scratched and scratched.