Yes, it’s true: the French button accordion magician Vincent Peirani and his new trio joker (and on the act album of the same name that has just been released) turned to rock music for the first time and tried out electronic effects on his instrument – as if he hadn’t revolutionarily expanded its expressive possibilities earlier. Paradoxically, his live performance in the Unterfahrt resulted in music that was all the more poetic, focused on sound images and turned away from virtuosity.
Which has primarily to do with the fact that with him, the Italian (but also Paris-based) guitarist Federico Casagrande and the Israeli drummer Ziv Ravitz, who has lived in the USA for a long time and has now also moved to France, are obviously a soulmate, perfectly harmonizing collective has found. For long stretches of the concert, the three of them played with their eyes closed, completely concentrating on the sounds of the others, absorbing them or laughing, picking them up and carrying them on. It was like dreaming together.
Imaginative, imaginative and lyrical
Their enchanting, almost exhilarating music sounded accordingly pictorial, imaginative and lyrical. Of course, with the ballads and quiet pieces like Peirani’s ethereal “Les Armes de Syr” (dedicated to the Norse goddess Freya), Casagrande’s dazzling “Twilight” or several compositions by Ravitz, which made him at least as the star of the evening as Peirani: not yet His extra class, which combines American power and virtuosity with European lyrics and finesse, is sufficiently appreciated: a percussion melodist that is second to none. But even the powerful rock adaptations, such as “Copy Of A” by the Nine Inch Nailswere interludes, so to speak, in a splendid work of art.