About N. Nomurai:

Nemopilema Nomurai (order Rhizostomeae; common name: Echizen Kurage or Nomura's Jellyfish) are jellyfish which are among the largest in the sea, frequently reaching a width of 6 or 7 feet and a weight of 400 pounds or more. They have recently been proliferating wildly in the Sea of Japan, among other nearby waters, largely due to the over-fishing of their natural predators and other fish that these jellies would compete with for food, sewage and high-nutrient agricultural run-off feeding into the waters, and an increase in ports and other structures that the jellies' larvae attach to. In fact, jellyfish in general are now expected to have a larger biomass than all the fish in the oceans combined.

Due to their rapidly growing numbers, by the summer of 2005 Japanese fishers began to recognize the bane they posed while accidentally catching them by the hundreds in their giant nets. Because of their weight, these massive jellies would often times break their nets, and they would crush and ruin the caught fish with their ectoplasm and toxins, not to mention the physical threat to the fisherman.

As the problem grew out of control, the Japanese fish industry began using kill-nets and also sent out jellyfish death squads who captured these jellies by the thousands and slaughtered them as they lay piled upon the ship deck. Protected by rubber suits and goggles, the fishers walked over the jellies slashing them with long blades, then pushed the dying animals back into the water. They assumed this would effectively reduce the numbers of these troublesome jellyfish, but there was one critical detail of the N. Nomurai they had not considered.

As a defense mechanism, when threatened these jellies eject all of their sperm or eggs. This reproductive matter is pooled on the ship's deck and then unknowingly dumped into the sea to fertilize, meaning that these slaughters actually caused the jellies to procreate, by the millions, posthumously.

As ever, these jellyfish display why they are an evolutionary masterpiece.

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Our project, N. Nomurai, is an open structure / improvisational gathering aspiring to sonically represent these creatures' evolutionary journey: from the Big Bang, to the primordial stew among the earth's earliest organisms, to becoming one of the most refined; elegant; and enduring animals on the planet, to their recent over-proliferation as an unexpected side-effect of man's industriousness, to being slaughtered for their trespass, and finally thriving; for now at least; because of an overlooked genetic safety net. Improvising upon this narrative is our sole compositional from, though the overall interpretation is drastically different each time.