Accordionist/keyboardist Andrea Parkins performs a set of improvisations in a trio featuring guitarist Joe Morris and drummer Michael Sarin. Parkins’ feedback-laced accordion and energetic piano pointillism meshes with Morris’ guitar sound, which his original and unadorned. Sarin propels the group through an interweaving conversation that does not exclude exclamatory fragments, interruptions, and raw balladic ruminations.
Andrea Parkins is an American composer, sound artist, performer and improvisational musician based in New York. She is known for her inventive explorations on the electric accordion, generative sound processing, and arrangements of objects and sound. Parkins received a BFA from Tufts University and MFA from Mason Gross School of the Arts, Rutgers University. Parkins’s work is influenced by the compositional strategies of John Cage and Fluxus and pays homage to musique concrète and 1970s analog synth. Parkins often incorporates electronically processed accordion, customized sound processing, live tape manipulation, analog effects boxes, laptop electronics, acoustic piano, sampling, and amplified objects. Her method and sound were characterized by LA Weekly as: “The big, varied, confidently conceived abstractions Parkins yanks from her squeezebox, laptop, effects devices and maybe piano — cloudy and cranky one minute, surgically sharp the next.” With an unconventional approach to instruments, Parkins “fragments the instrument’s traditional vocabulary and expands its capabilities with electronics and extended techniques.” –Bio as of 2019