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Artist
Mario Batkovic
12+ albums
experimentalpost-minimalismcontemporary classicalminimalismaccordion
about
Mario Batkovic is a Swiss virtuoso solo accordion player born in Bosnia. His playing can be challenging and experimental, yet it maintains a masterfully beautiful quality. He scratches every nuance out of the instrument, integrating scratches and clicks into the arrangements and making a feature of the kind of tonal scars and birthmarks which are usually eradicated from recordings and live performances. At times the playing sounds like low end distorted feedback, at other times like an obscure analogue synthesiser. But the common thread running throughout is the quality in the writing and arrangement, and Batkovic's mastery of this instrument. When Batkovic was in his teens, he spent several years experimenting with his instrument, on its own, without any effects. Through these experiments he learnt how to listen to one tone, realising that in this one tone can be found a world of music. In the end he chose the harder path, understanding there was nothing which could make the sound of the instrument as good as the instrument alone. He now sees his mission as an advancement in the sonic possibilities available to the instrument, and in the communication of these sounds. Batkovic leans on no styles of music, and is not comparable to any one style, instead connecting different musical worlds and distilling them into one unique concentrated sound. As an artist he has had to play as many different styles as possible throughout his life to enable him to find his own sound. He
