Born to an architect and a calligrapher in Hokkaido, Japan in 1984, Kaz began studying Classical and Jazz guitar at the age of 13—moving to Seattle at 18 to study musical composition. Shortly after his arrival, the diminutive and charismatic Nomura co-founded (along with two other like-minded Japanese émigrés) the city-conquering, genre-defying free-improv trio Na—who, before their residency-related demise in 2006, self-released over 40 recordings.

Following the dissolution of his band, Nomura—now armed with a fancy music degree—decided to refine his focus: constricting his work from genre-less abandon to more traditional song structures. The result is PWRFL Power: an unconventional marriage of melodically rich, Fahey-styled acoustic virtuosity and conversational, knowingly naïve lyrical abandon. With the most basic of building blocks, Nomura forges a uniquely avant-informed brand of outsider folk music—one that relies as much on impish mischief as it does on considered craft and technique.