Pascal Contet's accordion-playing, as light, compact, and indispensable as breathing itself, invents space through a kind of consonantal and vocalic alliteration.
Without artifice.
His unaffected departures from the sheltered moorings of schools and musical styles make the accordion, or its potential rather, feel like an imaginary small craft to which we cling on a gentle, contrasting pleasure cruise.
Simple phrases full of virtuosity, a sonotity both minimalist and grandiose, a technique never forceful and voluntarily self-effacing, in Pascal Contet's hands, the accordion is no shoulder-strap piano, no poor man's instrument : it becomes, through finely controlled electronic transformations, a richly compact electro-acoustic instrument, its sound framework punctuated with a masterful fusion of lightly percussive bellows and key effects.
At times almost silent, simply caressed, its barely exhaled tiny flourishes and minute creaking as it wavers between recognisable pitches and their transformed sounds, the accordion siddenly rages into a furious storm, unleashing through respiration and electric wizardry a savage, densely textured music that keeps returning, like a punctuation, to the initial full-stop, limpid sound of its opening note.
The field of the accordion, so familiar to us, so ingrained in our culture, here broadens, like never before, into a parallel universe, another dimension, both recognisable, yet totally new, serious playful, exacting yet higly colourful. Pascal Contet's perfect synthesis of rich inventiveness and accessible modernity, is an imaginative, new, composite and magical approach to the accordion, revealed here as light, compact and indispensable as air and breathing.
David Jisse
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Sound illustrating CD compiled by Christian Zanési
Sound illustrating CD
Intuitive and collective composition between the sound and the image.
