Playlouder - Music is the Network

In April of this year I received a missive from some PR company or other in the unlikely form of a paper leaflet detailing the plans of a Finnish accordionist named Kimmo Pohjonen to travel England playing gigs at a number of farms and incorporating the working machinery of the farm – ‘played’ by the farmers themselves – into his act.

It sounded interesting, certainly, but a bit of a novelty act – possibly too artsy for its own good, possibly some sort of leftfield comedy; this was April the first, after all.

Still, one couldn’t help but be curious, but making the trek out to a farm in the middle of nowhere to see something that could really go either way was a bit much even for such an intrepid explorer as myself, so I was dead chuffed when I noticed his name on Friday’s Concrete And Glass line-up. Kimmo was bringing his ‘Earth Machine Music’ to the city. An unlikely, unexpected, but eagerly anticipated feature of an eclectic cross-city line-up.

Kimmo’s a stout chap with a mini-mohawk and a bloody huge instrument, with about a million and ten buttons on it. He plays, for the most part, alone on the stage, rocking backwards and forward in something of a trance, fingers flickering over the accordion keys with an eerily innate know-how. The sounds he makes begin in a tentative and forlorn manner, spiralling and whirling over an industrial sounding backing of sampled machinery, which is recognisably unmusical for the briefest of periods, and fast evolves into the solidest of foundations for the accordionist’s improvisations.

The lighting is low and creepy as hell too, which seems an unnecessary feature of the performance at first, but after a while, one grows used to it, and it works sympathetically with the music and the mood.

As the set develops Kimmo sings, wails and howls into a microphone, with plenty of reverb, and possibly delay pedals; the effect is intriguing, but nothing to what comes next, when some switch is flicked and the buttons on his accordion become a plethora of farmyard animals and our ears are assaulted with a tangled mesh of snorts, grunts, clucks, groans and lowings. The noises are nightmarish at first, but their chaos gradually evolves into quite a soothing drone.

Later he is joined on stage by some farmers from one of his shows earlier in the year, operating what might be a threshing machine (but I’m no expert) – its clunks and whirrs providing another fascinating percussive backdrop for his meandering melodies.

In case anybody was ready to slip into a coma (and I mean that in a positive sense) a team of chainsaw-wielding extras take to the stage and fill us all with the fear of God for some time (before we realise their noisy instruments have been de-chained). 

Phew.

For all its futuristic effects and snazzy lighting, Kimmo's show is more evokative of rural feeling than the next folk group, and there's a real sense of having witnessed something truly unique, which you won't get from many acts, even in the impressive line-ups on show here over the past two days.

To have successfully adapted his extraordinary live show from the countryside farmyards (where it often involved tractors, amongst other things) to the relatively small stage in Café 1001 for the benefit of us “city boys”,  (as he jokingly refers to his crowd), is a truly impressive feat.