Well, Eyjafjallajökull did not just make a big mess of flights around the globe, it also put a little hold on my plans to put up more reviews from Iceland on the site. Well maybe it was just me being lazy and not the volcano, but after a few months in hibernation I did go catch some music at the Reykjavik Arts Festival.
A few weeks back I interviewed finnish musician Kimmo Pohjonen for Morgunblaðið, the daily paper I work at. When I got the assignment I was not the familiar with his music or the stuff he had produced over the years, so I went on a few day Youtube bender and was pleasantly surprised by what I saw and heard. When I think about accordion-music its usually associated with music from eastern Europe, polka or some sort of worldly folky-music, that last one might not even be a genre. Pohjonen takes the accordian to a whole new level. He mixes electronic sounds to those of his Finnish musical upbringing and transforms it into something new that he cant even describe or put in a category so I dont think Im able to do it either, its just something everyone needs to hear for themselves. It’s not often at a concert that the performer seems to go into a shaman like trance while playing his songs, but looking at Pohjonen you could see he was in another world while crafting his amazing and unique music.
For his encore, Pohjonen played a section from his Earth Machine Music project, where he travled the world and recorded samples of sounds from farming machines at farms in the country-side. What a great way to end the night. With a song played entirely from samples of machine sounds, something you dont hear every day.
