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Kimmo Pohjonen (Finland)
Song : Ulaani
Album : Kluster (Rockadillo, Finland)
Visit :
Elsewhere in ±«Óãtvi : Album review
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With his cheeky mohawk, ambiguous dress sense and hyper-imaginitive playing techniques, Kimmo Pohjonen is not your average accordionist. This is a performer who uses his Finnish folk roots as a creative spring board for an extraordinary hybrid of unhinged experimental music and performance art, taking his chosen instrument to unheard (of) places.
He relishes all incidental noises the archaic squeeze-box makes, employing everything from bellows to buttons in a feverish search for new sounds. His beautifully lit shows segue one eye-poppingly radical idea after another, making full use of state-of-the-art technology to produce percussive and tonal effects with samples and loops, all delivered through a stunning quadraphonic surround sound system. Once seen and heard, he is never forgotten. 'My goal is to explore the instrument because it's always had such a narrow minded image,' he says of the five row chromatic accordion which he generally favours.
He started playing at the age of ten. Encouraged by his father, a member of the local accordion club in the town of Viiala, he got his first musical grounding in styles like polka and humppa before leaving for Helsinki to study classical music at the world famous Sibelius Academy. After five years, he crossed over to its folk music department, where he was encouraged to compose his own material. This set him on his current spectacular career trajectory.
In all, his training sprawled over twelve years (including a short stint learning thumb piano at Tanzania's Bagamoyo College of Arts) and ended with the launch of his solo career in 1996. Before and since then, he has collaborated with a diverse range of artists in the fields of dance, theatre, folk, rock and avant-garde, contributing to numerous recordings.
His three solo albums so far neatly reflect quite different stage personnae. Kielo (1999) is just Kimmo and his instrument (plus effects pedals!), and ranges from delicate folk melodies to shrieking squalls of noise. On Kluster (2002), he joins forces with leading Finnish percussionist Samuli Kosminen, who uses only samples of Kimmo's playing and abstract vocalising, echoing their author with novel and often eerie consequences. The latest and most ambitious project is Kalmuk, which employs the collective talents of percussionists Abdissa Assefa and Kosminen with the 15-piece Tapiola
Sinfonietta.
'I wanted to make a symphony which would raise a few eyebrows, even my own,' he told Late Junction presenter Fiona Talkington just before the première of Kalmuk in November 2000. Two years on, there were quite a few jaws dropping as well when he took the same show to London's Queen Elizabeth Hall.
Jon Lusk 2002
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