MARIO BATKOVIC
Bosnian-Swiss lightning-conductor drags humble accordion screaming into futurity.
An accordion player, you say? Leave your preconceptions at the door, because this Bosnian squeezebox fiend will put your brain through the wringer.
“I’m a servant to the music,” smiles one-man accordion army Mario Batkovic, who has stunned festival crowds at ATP, Montreux Jazz and Le Guess Who? with the wildness and invention of his playing. The Swiss-based virtuoso began his explorations ‘accidentally’ aged four, when bequeathed a red accordion by a jaded uncle. “Where I grew up [Banja Luka, Bosnia and Herzegovina] you either played music or sang in a group. It could have been a flute, a trombone or something cool like a guitar, but my uncle was happy to get rid of it – it meant he didn’t have to play at every party. I can still smell that accordion!” Soon Batkovic was spending every waking moment experimenting with his new main squeez, eking out its nuances and expanding its pitch, volume and timbre. By his teens he was the unavoidable centre of attention in a series of folk, punk, rock and pop outfits, memorising songs due to his limited resources. “I didn’t own a radio or records; I had to play what I wanted to hear. Later, at college, I loved to play bass to Beethoven symphonies because I missed something just listening – I always had to add my own note.” He moved to Switzerland aged 14 and, despite being “the opposite of the classical idea”, radically prospered at Hanover’s Hochschule für Musik und Theater and Basle’s Musik-Akademie. Afterwards he began his highly physical and impassioned solo performances. One of these so impressed Geoff Barrow that in 2015 the Portishead founder took Batkovic on tour with his krautoid-electric trio Beak. Barrow later signed him to his
Invada imprint and challenged Batkovic to compose differently in the studio. “Meeting Geoff definitely had an effect on my music,” says Batkovic. “When I’m writing I either listen to what’s in my head – there’s a 24-hour annoying radio station in there – or I simply play a tone and listen to what the music tells me. No rules! I react badly to guidelines.” The pair spent over a year battling technical issues to perfect the contrasting resonant bass and fluttering high melodies of his eponymous debut album. Given rhythmic life by the instrument’s in-out bellows action, the album criss-crosses classical, chamber and contemporary classifications, and suggests Glass and Mozart as well as analogue electronics and demonic rock opera. “I try to find beauty in the darkness,” he says. “I fight for artistic freedom. I’m really lucky to do a peaceful thing, and make a positive contribution at this time.” Get lost in it and you’ll quickly forget its creator is wielding an accordion, and figure on something far more open, galvanising and ethereal. “The accordion is a musical rough diamond to me, wonderful but unfinished,” he says modestly. In Batkovic’s miraculous hands, though, it truly is something else. Mario Batkovic’s self-titled debut is out on March 17 on Invada.
“I SIMPLY PLAY A TONE AND LISTEN TO WHAT THE MUSIC TELLS ME.”