Finnish accordionist Kimmo Pohjonen and his experimental farmyard sound
In a barn on Oxfordshire Park Produce, Suomi musician Kimmo Pohjonen is holding up a microphone to a six-tonne tractor. "Turn the railway locomotive over over again, please," he asks the fannie Farmer. The barn fills with sound. "Beautiful," he says. "Fabulous."
Pohjonen is Finland's well-nigh internationally celebrated coeval musician and, arguably, the world's only if new wave accordionist. The 40-year-old's trim Mohawk and oK features loan him to a greater extent than a pass resemblance to David Beckham. Pohjonen, likewise, has a disposition to be photographed bare-chested. "Gymnasium? Ne'er!" he says. "My muscles all come from performing the accordion. It weighs 18 kilos so whenever I pick my child up, it's a physical exercise ... a rassling jibe." He chuckles at his status as experimental music's solitary confinement sex activity symbol, and declares it's time to visit the milking spill. "The rhythms those milking machines mother when attached to the kine, they're great," he says. "I motivation to record them."
Pohjonen's electric current project, Earth Machine Music, involves him sample distribution sounds from quaternion English farms, before returning to Suomi where he will draw up music from these samples. He is returning to perform at these sami farms by and by this calendar month and, at from each one concert, volition shoot the samples of that particular farm from his squeeze box while the farmers shift in with occasional dwell tractor accompaniment.
"An environmental artistic production small-arm" is how he describes it. "I grew up in a small small town in northern Finland, so I'm used to being on farms, companion with their sounds. I like the idea of making music with everyday raise machinery." We come at the milking shed. "Great," he says, hearing its churning rhythm, "I've got to sampling it!" Pohjonen's ebullience appears to sweep up everyone on the farm, and entirely do their c. H. Best to fit his requests. James Zachary Taylor, Oxford Parking lot Farm's owner, admits he had initial reservations. "Naturally, I was fearful of anything fresh and experimental," says Deems Taylor. "But I idea, 'Why not?' I like the idea of art and land. I think it will be ... wacky." Wacky seems guaranteed at what must sure enough be the virtually offbeat UK go this twelvemonth with performances held in barns and cowsheds.
Reappearing from the milking throw off, Pohjonen says this is not the kickoff time bovine muses take in inspired him. "I played for cattle for the first clip 20 years ago. I was at a music camp in Suomi and I placed an advert in the local anaesthetic paper locution, 'Do you want me to play for your cattle?' It was a jape, just so a granger called, so I went at 4am and then played for the bos taurus. That day, they produced an average of 18.5 litres. Unremarkably it was 17. So euphony decidedly plant for oxen."
We roam over to Cobb House, a tiny bungalow built exploitation sustainable materials by artist/farmer Michael Vaulting horse. Pohjonen wants to record book the musical rhythm of a hand-turned flourmill, so Buck gets to work. "Goodness, trade good," says the Finn as the mill's whir beat fills the cottage, "I can by all odds loop this." He and Dollar discuss the possibility of his performing the flourmill inhabit at the concert. "I'm sampling lots of things, just I like to bear sound performed by the people world Health Organization live on the farm," says Pohjonen. "Such a pity we can't shift the milking spill up to where we testament perform - I love its rhythm method of birth control!"
Buck then demonstrates how he makes thatched roof by pound triticale, which gives forth a rustling sound. "Like it, like it!" Pohjonen enthuses. "Bring it along with the milling machinery and we'll make threshing the beginning music of the night."
A Finnish TV crew is documenting entirely this. Pohjonen's radical advance to the piano accordion has made him an in-demand figure for international humanistic discipline festivals, twice participating in the Southbank Centre's Nuclear meltdown festival, and a famous person at home. "Oh, no, I'm non that famous," he says. "Actually, Finns mean I'm passably wyrd: 90% of my concerts are exterior Republic of Finland, and that has made them bear attention."
He says the accordion is Finland's "unofficial national instrument". "My dad plays squeeze box and in our village we had an accordion club. I was the only when kid world Health Organization belonged - plunk for in the 1970s it was decidedly not chill. I learned Suomi folk songs and Finnish tango - we have a boastfully tango vista in Suomi - then I went to the Johan Julius Christian Sibelius Academy and learned serious music squeeze box. I played in rock, jazz and electronic groups and studied in Buenos Aires, where you birth the to the highest degree incredible bandoneon players. Finnish phratry, Argentine tango, Tex-Mex, Balkan - I used to centre real powerfully on them completely, simply I couldn't regain myself in them."
"It was playing with rock'n'roll groups that encouraged me to develop my accordion into an electronic instrument - I wanted to be heard above the drums and guitars - so I began modifying the squeeze box. Now it has a built-in sampler that looks like a bomb calorimeter ... gets me in stacks of trouble when I go through airports. For the last five-spot days I've been sampling myself and combine acoustic and electronic piano accordion to make newly colors. For this enlistment I'll be doing that, and also combination the sounds of the produce."
Musicians and farms might have a long affiliation, merely they more usually headway to the country to produce away from it entirely, non to find creative inspiration."Music is made wherever people hold out," says Pohjonen. "A farm is an interesting environment to have music on. Muck up out the cowshed, throw a few bales of hay about for seats and, hey, you've got a concert asaph Hall!"
Up to now the medicine Pohjonen testament present to rural England is unlikely to be anything they are familiar spirit with. Does he think his experimental shuffle of
