somewhere i have never travelled,gladly beyond
E.E. Cummings


With a striding waltz and melancholic wheeze, I hear Erin Schneider’s fingers tapdancing over the keys of her accordion with each push and pull of the bellows. Held tight to her heart, she holds a fulsome band with depthless histories and peripatetic lives woven into its breathy melodies. All of it’s squeezed into the wail and gasp, dance and chromatics of this singular squeezebox.

Erin’s songs slide like stockinged feet across a waxed parquet floor, like elaborate dances made by spiders on water, like the bubbling laughter of a river echoing through a desert canyon. In her rhythms are ghosts from a thousand forgotten festivals and midnight parties, I blush with the memories of ancestors whose names are lost to time, hear the dance steps of humans across generations and our love of harmony over centuries. Through Erin’s songs, I feel the wind she travels on across time and space. Her accordion bounces with giggling humor, it weeps with a mystery and mourning.

And I am charmed.

Her fingers and arms, her spirit and sorrow and humor pull these folk songs and orchestral melodies from a book of tunes that have stuck with her over the last 15 years of playing. Picked up on the road, from fellow travellers, by ear and by rote.

Woven into these songs, traditional and folk, classical and avante-garde is also the artist who made them, with a life full of experiment and vision, play and community, radical politics with a wry humor. Soaked in the stories and lessons of visionaries, she beams all of this rainbow into these tunes, keyed and bellowed through her sonorous accordion. In all of Erin’s work as an artist and publisher, dancer and musician, writer and archivist, I feel a relationship to place, a calling to find the stories of strugglers and dreamers in the past and to aid those in the present into the future, a glimmer of psychedelic vision, a casual ease with the wildly experimental and obscurely traditional, a heartfelt communion with working folk throughout time, a special titillation with the incidental and accidental beauty of people and the geographies they inhabit, a comfort with big ideas and beautiful weirdness, and her deep, sincere affection for mad utopianists and darkling romantics. And though this album is solely performed by Erin, within it are the links and stories of her teachers and collaborators, the places she’s been and the places she dreams of, a cast of dancers and painters, post-hippie ceramicists and New Age occultists, a microtonal father and radical matriarch. I feel the hundreds of musicians she’s performed alongside and the artists she’s aided and abetted (and who have aided and abetted her) over the years that she’s been playing the accordion and moving through the world with a truly artful grace.

Erin’s love affair with the accordion began when as as teenager, she was struck by the songs of Breton composer and multi-instrumentalist Yann Tiersen who had lent his tunes to Jean-Pierre Jeunet’s whimsical cinematic romance Le Fabuleux Destin d'Amélie Poulain in 2001. Whisked away by Tiersen’s accordion, many found in his compositions the dreams and fantasies of the Paris of another world. The Paris of our dreams, of memories that aren’t really ours, a place we have longed to visit but which may have never really existed, the songs of that Paris echo off the cobblestones of Montmartre and tinkle from wine-sinks down the dark alleys of a different century. But even as Paris is the repository of so much fantasy, these melodies, the ones that sigh through an accordion's reeds, can truly be heard wherever the scatter of Europeans and their musical descendants landed across the world, squeezeboxes in hand.

In this album, Erin plays a traditional turning dance, “Invartita”, and a Marcel Budala circle frolic, “Cadâneasca”, both from Romania, alongside a sweet country melody from Macedonia “Eleno Kerko” (“Eleno dear Eleno… What kind of book are you writing...”). She includes the 17th century Irish song “Tabhair Dom Do Lámh (Give me Your Hand)” by Ruadri Dáll ó Catháin, who may or may not have existed, along with a flock of Swedish folk songs, many of which she learned studying for a year in rural Sweden in 2008 at the Birka Folkhögskola in Jämtland. In one, she combines a medley of two schottis (couples dances), their titles coupling together the names of a Viking burial mound “Schottis på Tibrandshögen” and the island it sits upon, “Schottis från Rödon”.

Erin includes here a scatter of Swedish polskas, “Åtatakten” and “Bisonpolska”, country dance songs with traditions that stretch back hundreds of years. Their origins surmised to come from the influence of the Polish court across the Nordic region, though some scholars mark that they were likely influenced by earlier Nordic visor. In Sweden, these songs were handed around and down, evolving over the centuries, families and villages having their own unique variations. And though professional and amateur archivists travelled the country through the 19th century collecting them, most of the research was done through the 1940s through the 1960s when most of the songs and dances had already been obliterated. I trail my finger along this story, because within it is a larger one that Erin taps into through her travels and tunes, a more epic tale about modernity and the importance of the accordion in that history. (One that for the curious can be found fictively and expertly realized in E. Annie Proulx’s Accordion Crimes from 1996.)

Though there have been a number of free reed aerophones since antiquity, (where breath or bellows vibrates through a reed in a frame) the first modern accordion was invented around 1829 in Vienna. The cost, range, and portability of the modern accordion made it a wildly popular instrument throughout the 19th century. An instrument you could play anywhere, easier to pack than a piano for peasants and workers boarding crowded ships to seek their fortunes in foreign ports (When Fernando Pessoa writes “There are ships sailing to many ports, but not a single one goes to where life is not painful; nor is there a port of call where it is possible to forget”, his words feel whispered through an accordion.) And like most instruments, the accordion plays well with others, but alone it can carry a dance party all by itself in the village square, in the candle-lit cantina, at your cousin’s wedding.

The accordion has travelled all over the world with the surge and tides of migrants, and it’s sounds truly evolved, sounding different in each new place, but it’s story goes back to regular people, before recorded music, simply making music for each other. The accordion was and still is an instrument for the people.

The popularity of the accordion in the 19th century tracks to a very specific moment in human history as millions across Europe left their villages for the boom and steam of the factories in cities, and onward and outward across oceans to seek their fortunes. And their songs came with them. Like many immigrants and their ancestors here in the US (and elsewhere I’m sure), I hear the accordion like the wafting music from the Old World that is a part of who I am but exists beyond a scrim of lost language and history I can’t cross. It is a world of folklore and family, of “ethnic” church festivals and the memories of a world that all but disappeared with the passing of my elders. I heard it as a child over the chatter of dialects I never learned at weddings surrounded by cousins all since scattered to the winds after we lost our matriarchs, matriarchs who often spoke languages we were never taught to speak.

For me as many I’m sure, the accordion is a lost world. Though you can hear its melodies in Latin discos and French churchyards, German beer halls and slipping in with its joy and melancholy in American songs from the Beach Boys to Tom Waits, it hearkens to me from another age. And though many of us have lost our ancestral languages, we have not lost the music. This is something modernity and capitalism hasn’t yet washed out. A connection for some of us to our ancestors and the places they came from, and to places never visited but who’s music calls to us, but not in the way a drum or a flute brings us back to the origins of human music, but capturing that exact moment when industrial modernity was changing life for humans that hadn’t changed that much for a thousand years.

It gives us continuity to village life from the Balkans and Sweden to Brazil and Mexico. The places many of our people left and many where they arrived, places we could have landed or who’s sonic texture compels, and from the internal migration from farming villages to factory towns, to those who traversed oceans as many migrants sought their fortunes elsewhere and the cultures they met once they arrived. The music of the accordion, as all music does, added to and evolved with the new places and the amalgamation of peoples that came together to dance. There are more accordion players today in China (for example) than in the rest of the world combined.

Like many Americans trying to find a way beyond what felt like the restrictive belief systems of my parents and their parents, I abandoned so much of their culture in the process, listening to guitars and synthesizers more than a mandolino or an ocarina.

In the work of Erin Schneider, I hear a whisper of that lost world of village life of my ancestors. But even so, Erin isn’t a preservationist really, but an avant-gardist with penchant for everyday people and the deeper stories of their passages. Hers is a practice as an artist that ranges from her work alongside the radical artists of the Llano del Rio Collective, to her dancing alongside the iconic experimental punk icon Thurston Moore and in a scatter of collaborations and artworks throughout Los Angeles, drawing maps and giving tours, collecting archives and myths from it's streets and memories.

Amidst the international folk songs on this record, she includes the melancholic strangeness of Eric Satie’s Gnossiennes and the tristesse of Chopin’s nocturne, along with her original composition, “Rivers to the Sea” (is it the Los Angeles River or all the rivers that take us out and away?)

Near the end of the record, she performs “Dobredin (Good Morning)”, a klezmer song to be played after a long night of partying. There’s a gliding smoothness, a sweet weariness still full of the echoing clatter, smashing joy, and boozy communion of the party, but softly taking us into daybreak. And no matter how weary your body may be, you are not ready to stop dancing. As the dark night turns into lavender milk, dawn rosy-fingering the day, your face hurts from smiling and your mouth feels like an ashtray and you fall asleep mid-sentence with your boots on, fighting to the end to drag the electricity of that moment on forever. I’m glad such moments are folded in Erin’s song, I can taste it with each breathy note. A place I have travelled and will travel to again, I hope.

Erin tells me that she travels with and through music. And here we get to travel with her, through the wind in her bellows, to lost worlds and new ones still being made.

And I am along for the ride.

-Andrew Berardini