Komorebi Live

The partnership of double bass with diatonic accordion might seem as unlikely as a romance between a Great Dane and a Jack Russell terrier. But such relationships happen and are fruitful. Both Adrien Tyberghein, the French bass player, and Belgian accordionist Didier Laloy are musicians as adventurous as they are virtuosic.

Laloy was in Belem & The Mekanics – the Mekanics being an instrument, a computer-controlled assemblage of cables, pipes and blades. Tyberghein’s bass is less bizarre but, connecting it to a battery of pedals, rubbing and slapping its body like a masseur, he produces – in ‘From Finnevaux to Timbuktu’, for instance – an extraordinary variety of sounds. In ‘Chatillon’ he plays so high his bass might be a violin, in ‘Under the Oaks’ so low it hums like an industrial plant. Laloy counters this sonority on his accordion, wandering over all three rows of buttons like a spider spinning a web, creating a running filigree of sound. In ‘Hat Man’ he introduces Vivaldi to Philip Glass.

Dyad’s compositions range symphonically. ‘Paseo Tragoedia Lego’, eight-and-a-half minutes long, moves from doom to dance – and on to hint at the inherent comedic aspect of the squeezebox.