Michel Doneda | Jonas Kocher | Christoph Schiller
/// grape skin

first membrane       17:29
second membrane   21:33

total time:               39:30

Michel Doneda     soprano saxophone & radio
Jonas Kocher       accordion & objects
Christoph Schiller   spinet & preparations

recorded in Ligerz, near Biel/Bienne, Switzerland in June 2010

Interview with Jonas Kocher

The title '/// Grape Skin' is rather unusual. What lies behind it?

The title has to do with the location where we recorded: a church surrounded by vineyards. The church was a striking venue which affected our playing and became a kind of skin around the music. It was Michel who suggested the title, and the three slashes remain a mystery to me.

You'd played with both Michel and Christoph before, though in separate contexts, so this was the first time you'd all played together as a trio. What strikes me immediately about the music is that it feels very assured and confident. Where do you think this quality came from?

For me this trio was a quite natural thing and I too felt a sense of assurance, both at the time and when I listened back to the recording. Everyone knew each other’s playing, and which qualities each of us were likely to bring to the music.  And we knew that we shared the same kind of musical understanding.  From the moment the trio was proposed I was convinced that the music would be interesting.

 

You said in a recent email that you felt that the location gave the music “a poetic feel”. What did you mean by this?

For me the church in Ligerz where we recorded has a very special atmosphere. Its location is amazing, up on a hillside in the middle of a vineyard and with a great view over the lake at Biel and the island where Jean-Jacques Rousseau lived for some weeks in the summer of 1765. The feeling you have there is one of great openness. When you’re inside the church, you don't see any of this but the feeling stays strong in your perception. And I think that you can hear that in our music.

The generous acoustic of the church influenced our playing too. We had to deal with space and silence.  At the same time the environment around the church wasn’t completely quiet, and sounds from outside entered our music. At various times you can hear birds, passing trains and even a boat siren on the recording. Theses sounds are totally integrated into our playing and are the elements that link us with the amazing surroundings outside the church. These outside sounds give the music another kind of reality and for me a strong poetic feel.

 

Most of the music on ‘///Grape Skin’ is quiet, and a lot of it is very beautiful.  Yet there’s an edginess and unpredictability about it too that for me makes it much more interesting than placid “music for meditation”.  Is this sense of ‘edge’ something that you consciously aim for?

The sense of 'edge’ that you refer to is something that all three of us share as musicians. When I play in duo with Michel, this is a very important part of our music. I think it creates something that’s really fragile but also very much alive at the same time.

 

On your excellent solo cd ‘Materials’ (on Creative Sources) you played both accordion and electronics, but on ‘///Grape Skin’ you just use accordion.  Why did you choose not to use electronics in this situation?

The reason is simply that after recording 'Materials' I stopped playing electronics. Now I prefer to play accordion in an ‘electronic’ way, as you can hear on '///Grape Skin', rather than adding electronics to my work.   I stopped playing electronics simply because I came to feel that the accordion is my instrument, the one I feel really close to, physically and emotionally.  I never felt that kind of bond, or the potential to develop a truly personal language with electronics.  And there are so many other people out there playing electronics that I didn't feel I needed to add my voice to them.

So when did you first play accordion, and how long ago did you start improvising with it?

I started as a child and afterwards studied accordion classically. I only began improvising with it seriously in 2005. Before that I improvised almost exclusively with electronics.  I somehow found it difficult to improvise with the instrument that I’d studied with. I think I needed time to digest all the years of classical training. Playing electronics helped me come back to the accordion with new eyes, ears and visions for the instrument.

For a long time there weren’t many people in improvised music playing accordion, but in recent years several players have emerged (Alfredo Costa Monteiro, Luca Venitucci, Ute Volker, Esteban Algora, to name just a few).  Do you think it’s an instrument that’s well suited to improvisation?

It's certainly an interesting instrument to work with in improvisation but it also has strong limitations.  The main one is that you can't work directly on the mechanics by which it produces sound in the way that you can with most other instruments.  You can use the body of the instrument, but it’s not very resonant; the sounds produced on it are mostly dry.  But despite these limitations I love working with the accordion.  I think it’s a really interesting mix between something human (it ‘breathes’ and is like a body) and something industrial (like a machine with lots of buttons and electronic sounds that are like sine waves). And last but not least, the accordion has a very strong and particular image in musical history that is interesting to play with.  So for me the accordion’s a huge field of experimentation, with lots of playing techniques still to be developed.

Reviews

A particularly strong one from a trio with Doneda, accordionist Jonas Kocher, and spinet player Christoph Schiller. The session was recorded in June, 2010 at a church in Ligerz, Switzerland located on a hillside in the middle of a vineyard. Like the two releases above, the instrumentation is integral to the way this session unfolds. While Kocher had previously augmented his accordion with electronics, he's now sticking solely to the acoustic instrument, creating whispered drones and pulsing dark chords colored with the patter of keys and buttons. I'd not heard of Schiller before his stellar duo with tuba player Carl Ludwig Hübsch (part of Another Timbre's recent brass series), and his spinet, extended through the use of preparations and eBow, adds a steely, percussive resonance to the mix. Doneda sticks to soprano here, moving between multiphonic overblowing, pinched and clipped attack, and breathy exhalations. The two extended improvisations are models of collective listening, and as always, Simon Reynell captures the way that the musicians interact with the performance space with salient clarity, allowing ambient sounds from outside the church to drift and mix naturally into the music as it unfolds. Another winner from the ever-reliable Another Timbre, well worth searching out.”
Michael Rosenstein, Paris Transatlantic“

“The flux and reflux of this water, its continuous sound, swelling at intervals, struck ceaselessly my ears and my eyes, responding to the internal movements which reverie extinguished in me, and sufficed to make me feel my existence with pleasure, without taking the trouble to think.”

Substitute music for water and you've got a pretty good description of these two spacious, colourful and beautifully paced improvisations.  Doneda (soprano sax), Kocher (accordion) and Schiller (prepared spinet) perform in the warm acoustic of the tiny church of Ligerz overlooking St Peter's Island in Lake Biel in Switzerland, where Jean-Jacques Rousseau penned the words about two and a half centuries ago.”
Dan Warburton, The Wire

"A fascinating act, divided into two comprehensive improvisations for soprano sax and radio (Doneda), accordion and objects (Kocher) and prepared spinet (Schiller). Crepuscular tones abound, the musicians picking ways of emitting sounds according to a “let’s-put-this-in-and-see-how-it-works” approach rather than simply letting the instrumental unrest move around. The sections in which the three superimposed voices try to show some fangs – for example, after the third minute of “Second Membrane” – are indeed succinct outbursts immediately returning to the original dimness. The actual pitches are scarcely definable, a considerable part of the action happening in areas where hush, environmental resonance and treatment of the instrument’s intrinsic technicalities meet. Acumen and self-discipline are applied throughout, causing the music to turn away from typical EAI routines just in time. The accordion – more than the saxophone – shows a tendency to exhale heavily, and Schiller’s economical utilization of an uncommon resource makes sure that the quantity of percussive luminosity and scratchy details remains completely tolerable, never invading zones where those features are redundant. At the end of the day, this record fuses communication and painstaking investigation almost flawlessly. Love at first sight is unlikely, but several of its values are unarguable, substance systematically prevailing over aesthetical appearance.”     Massimo Ricci, Touching extremes