The programme notes to Kimmo Pohjonen's Meltdown show positively flap with ecstatic superlatives praising his uncompromising intensity, originality and brain-bursting (you get the idea) multi-dimensionality. In the programme's defence, when the Finnish accordion virtuoso visited the London jazz festival a couple of years ago, the astonished audience would probably have insisted that most superlatives in most languages would have been inadequate to describe him. They would have been right.
Pohjonen was simply amazing on that occasion, a solo star who hitched the accordion to state-of-the-art technology to give it a huge orchestral scope while retaining its folksy communality. He improvised exquisitely, and performed with a surreal theatricality, at one point memorably pretending to be eaten by his own feverishly thrashing instrument. This week his show was more rigorously controlled, and he needed to fit his headlong variations around Samuli Kosminen's contributions on sampler and electric percussion. But if the result meant more repeating loops and an emphasis on Pohjonen's eccentrically abstract version of hot licks, the accordionist undoubtedly consolidated his growing reputation as one of Europe's musical innovators.
Pohjonen began and ended rhapsodically and romantically, his thick chording and layered countermelodic playing often suggesting a delicately blown instrument. But he quickly warped the mood of fireside folksiness into traffic-noise roars and bent-pitch chords, followed by rainforest chatterings that gave way to sinister Jurassic Park rattles and roars. An abstract all-vocal episode in which Pohjonen appeared to be steadily driven nuts by buzzing insects inside his head was positively spine-chilling.
Kosminen, a delicate performer, carefully padded through Pohjonen's haunting soundscapes. The increased use of loops and samples in the accordionist's work, however, has diminished his inclination to explore the instrument's natural sonorities as excitingly as on his previous visit.
Sonorities of any kind were absent from the other half of the bill, a solo performance by Chicago avant-busker the Lonesome Organist. His simultaneous keyboard playing and drumming was briefly intriguing, and his combined steel-pan playing and tapdancing downright charming, but a musical element was mostly missing. However weird Pohjonen gets, doing something unmusical isn't in his frame of possibilities, so the contrast was starker than it might have been.
