This is improbable duo is bound to make you smile and laugh, involuntarily and a lot. Swiss, Berlin-based turntablist Joke Lanz, known as the leader of Sudden Infant, vs. fellow-Swiss accordionist Jonas Kocher. Two sound artists – one is an anarchist, gifted with a microscopic attention span but with rich Dadaist imagination, the other one is a natural melodicist who has developed an iconoclastic approach to his instrument and here acts as the responsible adult. But both are united in a rebellious quest for new aerobic dances and with a clear affection for random, noisy sounds.

The duo of Lanz and Kocher was recorded in January 2017 and their first album «Abstract Musette» references – obviously, ironically – the French 1960 Musette dance music, where the accordion was the main instrument. Both sound artists are in favor of fast and brief, chaotic dialogues, crisscrossing and twisting each other’s gestures with subversive yet detailed moves, colliding again with weird pulses. But, surprisingly, this kind of interplay only intensifies their intimate atmosphere.

You can experience «Abstract Musette» as 15 invitations to exercise your most daring dance moves while Lanz and Kocher will do their best to challenge your physical shape for dense 26 minutes. You would find out soon enough that only a few ones can resist the seduction of «El Biscotto», «Balcon Mexicain» and «Swing Valse» or the macho pathos of «Tango Lalandais». Some of the theatrical-ironic pieces focus on microtonal events, “Rêve de Clarinette” experiments with an abstract narrative but most of the pieces offer physical collisions. All somehow sound as inspired by close encounters of the third kind with very disobedient and musical aliens who, most likely, learned their dance moves from the Adams family.

Eyal Hareuveni

Joke Lanz (turntables), Jonas Kocher (acc)