Te

Samurai Accordion is an international collective of virtuoso diatonic button squeezebox players: Riccardo Tesi and Simone Bottasso from Italy; Kepa Junkera from the Basque Country; Markku Lepistö, a Finn; and Irishman David Munnelly. Samurai seems an unlikely sobriquet because they look an amiable bunch and, apart from the youngster Bottasso, if they have hair at all, it's grey. But the Samurai devoted their lives to a cause and each of these musicians has too: mastering an ostensibly limited instrument to create subtle, complex and beautiful music. This is very demanding of the hands, which explains the album's Japanese-language title: Te (Hands).

Each player contributes two tunes, offering their own traditions and personalities for the others to respond to. Kepa Junkera's ‘Gernika’, for instance, is an ambitious sound portrait of the Basque town of that name. It features the female group Sorginak singing their irrintzi, a joyous half yell, half yodel. Then a siren intrudes – a reminder that Hitler's air force, at Franco's request, bombed the civilian population there in 1937 – eliciting some interventions from the other players that are as jagged as the brush-strokes of Picasso's famous painting. The album opens with Tesi's ‘Sushi Time’, which involves the breathing of the bellows as well as the notes of the buttons in a way that is both playful and plaintive. It concludes with ‘Getting Lost in Bagdad’ by Simone Bottasso, in which melody lines are taken up by the players and grow ever more intricate and twisting, like the narrow streets of an old town. Meanwhile the sinister bass lines growl, suggesting the rising panic one feels when lost in a strange place. There are only five, not seven, accordion Samurai; they are, however, magnificent.