If most people still imagine the accordion as a wheezing box for folk dances or Parisian clichés, Jonas Kocher prefers to treat it like a tectonic plate shifting under your feet. "Archipelago" - his third solo album, arriving more than a decade after "Solo" (2011) and "Materials" (2009) - feels less like a return to roots than a refusal to have any.

Recorded in one day in Biel/Bienne, the seven improvisations unfold like islands appearing in a fog: distinct yet interconnected, precariously floating in the same turbulent sea. Kocher wrestles his Bugari Bayan 2RC into producing sonorities that could pass for electronics, metallic groans, or breath caught mid-collapse. At times, chords resonate like cathedral bells; elsewhere, sharp attacks slice the air like broken glass. It is music that knows the border between organic and mechanical is a polite fiction - and that the accordion, with its lungs of bellows, can breathe both ways.

There are no lyrics here - unless you count the squeals, drones, and whispers as a private language - but the album does suggest a narrative: the slow cartography of sound as survival. Every track is a negotiation between control and accident, between geometry and chance, as if Kocher were drawing maps with a pen that insists on wandering off the paper.

Ironically, the title "Archipelago" is apt: these pieces are solitary islands, yes, but they also imply submerged connections, unseen ridges under the waterline. You don’t just listen, you navigate, testing the currents, waiting for the next shore. And in a world where accordionists are too often sentenced to entertain in the background, Kocher insists on the opposite: here, the instrument sits front and center, uncompromising, elemental, slyly defiant.

This is not music to sip wine to - it’s music that knocks the glass from your hand, then lets you hear the shards ring out on the floor.