The collection Radis from the Oslo-based trio of Andrea Giordano, Kalle Moberg and Jo David Meyer Lysne is the type of thing that will reward that little bit of curiosity from generous and sensitive ears. Easy to set aside or shun, its sometimes uncanny or even ungainly blend of Giordano’s raw voice with airs and drones on the accordion and sharper organetto, plus wiry guitar abrasions and the odd snare, makes for a texturally uncompromising but in fact very soothing and singularly engaging listen.
Radis stems from Giordano’s desire upon relocating to Oslo to retain a throughline with her native Cuneo, a city and province in the Piedmont region of northwestern Italy. To this end the songs on Radis are based upon the words of three twentieth-century Piedmontese poets in Nino Costa, Bianca Dorato and Oreste Gallina. For years Giordano corresponded with her grandmother on the meaning of these texts, whether translating certain phrases or striving to better parse unfamiliar terms, sometimes incorporating aspects of the Piedmontese language as she remembered it from her childhood. The project then is highly personal as it afforded Giordano another stratum of connection to her grandmother and evokes that tender sense of home while Radis also served as a means of establishing new bonds as she sought new musical partnerships in Norway.
After crossing paths at a cafe, the accordionist Moberg was swiftly drawn to the project, identifying its importance in so far as it aids and explores an endangered language while sharing a linguistic bent as he notes that his family have been longtime advocates of Nynorsk. The guitarist Lysne meanwhile was shown a few sketches or drafts and instantly admired the freshness of Giordano’s voice. The two musicians began to shape some of the sonics, with Moberg’s background in jazz as he has worked with Mat Maneri, Ingebrigt HĆ„ker Flaten, Paal-Nilssen Love and the Italian pianist Giovanni Di Domenico while also featuring on last year’s standout Antigone by Eiko Ishibashi, while Lysne has explored electronic treatments, microtones and his own self-made instruments on albums with Mats Eilertsen and as one core half of Wendra Hill.
‘Fioria’ the opening song on Radis proves representative even as it adds another voice to the mix in the form of Mario Gabola on the alto saxophone. Commencing through Giordano’s solitary yet high-spirited and voluble Piedmontese, the musicians soon establish a layered drone through Moberg’s accordion and Gabola’s alto saxophone which was adorned with tin cans and springs, adding an audible rattling and a springiness similar to the vibrating tines of a mouth harp to the buzzing and humming of the drones, an effect which sometimes suggests a low swarm of bees. This wheezing musicality begins to sputter towards the end of the composition, as Giordano’s more tenuous vocals peter out and the piece resolves into a sworling flute sound which is actually the deft wind of the saxophone, the accordion all the while maintaining a plaintive drone as part of the backdrop.
If the concept or the locale might call to mind Silvia Tarozzi and Deborah Walker’s acclaimed 2022 folk recreation Canti di guerra, di lavoro e d’amore the shifting patchworks of sound on this opening track remind me a little of Bjƶrk who foregrounded the shÅ and harp as well as oboes and trombones on her Drawing Restraint 9 soundtrack or a cappella vocals on MedĆŗlla.
Otherwise the album notes suggest an occasional kinship with two other cult classics: the cabaret singer and film actress Maria Monti’s avant-garde folk turn, the cherished Il Bestiario which was released in 1974 with lyrics by the notorious poet Aldo Braibanti, arrangements by Alvin Curran and saxophone by the soprano pioneer Steve Lacy, a record elevated for modern ears by its reissue on Unseen Worlds in 2018; and the Greek composer Nikiforos Rotas’s settings of poetry by Constantine P. Cavafy which offered a pared-back take on Ć©ntekhno through prepared or experimental instrumentation.
In fact despite the beguiling quality of Radis and its contribution not only to Piedmontese but to a broader intersection of experimental folk music and sound poetry, the album was almost left unfinished, as the trio struggled to reconcile its piecemeal or disparate parts and diverged in their own musical expectations. After a lull of a couple of years a get together with Gabola outside of Naples helped to clarify the direction of the project, with the timbre of his alto saxophone and the percussive aspects of his accoutrements rubbing up nicely with Moberg’s accordion.
Some of this tentativeness or provisionality lingers over Radis to stimulating effect while the spatial inclusion of Naples hardly seems haphazard as at times the album broaches the canzone napoletana tradition and its nostalgic bent. Yet the combination of organetto and accordion has correlates across Italy and beyond, from the old tandem of piffero and mĆ¼sa which characterised dance numbers and folk songs in Piedmont and other parts of northern Italy before the bagpipe was gradually replaced by the accordion, to the pairing of the piercing ciaramella and droning zampogna across the south.
At first the second song ‘MalinconƬe’ seems to promise more traditional accordion melodies but soon cuts those off for another woozy and wheezing patchwork of textures, now dominated by the scratchy and gasping organetto and its distinctive high pitch. A percussive layer briefly sounds like a ratcheting gĆ¼iro as Giordano delivers a swooning, seaside vocal before a few plucks of guitar lead us into ‘PĆ«r mi ancheuj’. Here deep and sonorous plucks set the scene alongside some typewriter percussion and scratchy bows or drones which evoke the lowing of cattle. This naturalistic setting proves the site for a bit of a dirge, rustic and mournful, the low moaning drones offset by the tine-like strings of the guitar until some fuller strums imbue the piece with a dusky or nocturnal character, as though we had witnessed some of the chatter before bedtime and now the dotted bovines and other animals were turning in for the night.
‘Profij dĆ«spers’ offers an opening duet between the accordion and organetto, calling to mind the ECM collaborations of the saxophonist Trygve Seim and accordionist Frode Haltli, most recently on their superb album Our Time. Blending the ardent and melancholy or at times somehow visited or spectral folk airs of the accordion with a liturgical high pitch, from the halfway point Lysne gets in on the action, inserting himself right in the middle of Giordano’s organetto or burgeoning vocals and Moberg’s accordion through these strange background reverberations from his prepared guitar. It is as though someone was pulling and humping a grand piano or some other amorphous mass ever closer to the listener, with his strings growing ever more wiry in the manner of spokes popping loose from a bicycle’s wheel. ‘Profij dĆ«spers’ then would make a curiously appropriate accompaniment for a Monsieur Hulot escapade or in an Italian context perhaps one of the many misadventures of the hapless Fantozzi.
The muted, sputtering and buzzing drones of ‘D’antorn a lor’ sound like a lawnmower from a few houses over or an aeroplane propeller winding down. The textures here almost border on shoegaze in the vein of My Bloody Valentine or early Smashing Pumpkins, before Lysne takes us through a kind of quixotic and somewhat baffling change of pace as he starts picking out a bucolic, blossoming pattern on his guitar. Ornate and sharing much with the lute or zither, meanwhile Giordano’s voice intones. The overall effect is a bit like a raga or the ghazals and qawwali of Arooj Aftab, at least until the drone thins out and is finally shorn of other accompaniment, at last resembling a rubbery duck call.
By contrast ‘Guarda me cheur’ is so shrill that it almost ruptures one’s inner ear, those piercing tones and scraping effects lying atop a beautifully clear and wistful melody, pristine as the morning sea. The song seems rife with feedback and distortion and there is more of that gĆ¼iro sound, possibly from Lysne’s snare as Giordano sings from the midpoint in an emergent whisper. Then as Radis draws to a close her voice remains wispy but landbound once again and a thrust of joy is in the air, with ‘E semper ti’ stringing together all of the trio’s aspects or features.
A winding accordion and organetto melody is offset by the pressing of their buttons, which sound like small percussive rivulets, and the guitar sidles alongside in relatively fulsome accompaniment for a fine trio sendoff until the composition is stripped down or pared back or burns out to just the embers: the accordion now a loose and lonesome wind, the guitar splintering in cartoon fashion, strings bouncing and coiling in all directions. At last Giordano herself burns or transports through this minor or twilight encampment and we get a kind of outro or coda of just her voice, singing as always in Piedmontese, here with the hypnotic or even shamanistic force of a Vaishnava mantra or runosong from the border Karelia region.
