KATA on NPR

The Kata Project was featured on National Public Radio’s All Things Considered program.

You can read the article with media excerpts, and interviews with the KATA team on NPR’s website.

“Listen To New Music Inspired By Karate's Olympic Debut”

Composer Gene Coleman, a Guggenheim-winning luminary in the worlds of experimental film and avant-garde music, is more the type to show up for a residency at a prestigious music festival rather than at the Olympics.

Coleman's creation is called KATA, after the elegantly choreographed patterns of movements practiced by martial artists. "If you're a beginning karate student, you learn kata," Coleman explains. "And those kata contain all the movements that that particular style of karate is composed of." It's like music, and also like code.