There’s something wonderful about first hearing an instrument transformed, such as Eric Glick Rieman preparing a Fender-Rhodes electric piano or Seymour Wright playing a saxophone by tapping and amplifying it, not blowing it for long stretches of time. As fine as those experiences might be it’s more striking still to hear an ensemble playing the same instruments with results that bear no immediate resemblance to one’s expectations, as if a new order of things has suddenly asserted itself. The group name 300 Basses might suggest an enormous orchestra or choir of low-pitched strings or voices, but the CD is stranger still: it’s a group of three accordionists—Alfredo Costa Monteiro, Jonas Kocher, and Luca Venitucci—who, in an hour-long program scarcely ever produce sounds suggesting that they’re playing accordions. The instruments and one’s expectations are utterly deconstructed. “Fuoco Fatua” is silence gently massaged with noise. “Abbandonato” is a contemplative chorus of electric saws. “Gira Bile” is a groan repeated and spaced with the care of an isolated interval in a Morton Feldman composition. “Maledetto” is a whistling sine wave. The ultimate achievement is not the accordion’s transformation but the extraordinary collectively improvised music of this ensemble, in which the distinct identities of Costa Monteiro, Kocher, and Venitucci are as submerged as the identity of their instruments. It’s a spectacular achievement on every level.
Stuart Broomer has written extensively on music, mostly improvised, for both general and specialist publications, and his liner essays have appeared on CDs by musicians from some 20 countries. The author of Time and Anthony Braxton (Mercury, 2009), he is currently writing a fantasia on the life of Memphis disc jockey Dewey Phillips. He has been intermittently active as an improvising musician since 1965; his composition Found Theme for the Age of Reason appeared in Musicworks 112. He lives in Toronto.