Mats Gustafsson / Kimmo Phjonen - Two Balls Are Enough

The Free Jazz Collective 0

By Eyal Hareuveni

The work of Finnish hyper-accordionist Kimmo Pohjonen has never been reviewed on this site. He comes from Finnish folk music but has revolutionized how it sounds, is played, and looks. Pedals and effects augment his accordion, and his own wordless vocals, and it sounds like a mini-orchestra. Pohjonen looks like a modern-day pagan shaman who moves with ecstatic dances and feels at home whether he plays with Kronos Quartet, French jazz drummer Eric Echampard or in the art-rock band KTU (alongside King Crimson alums drummer Pat Mastelotto and Touch guitarist Trey Gunn).

Swedish reed and electronics player Mats Gustafsson, like Pohjonen, is an adventurous, inimitable iconoclast who enjoys turning genres inside out like others do their pockets. He comes from punk rock and free jazz, but just look at his new collaborative projects from last year - the surf rock meets free jazz, The MagNuts (with guitarist Hedvig Mollestad), death metal meets free jazz, Backgrillen, and the free-improv flute duo, Flöjter, with French Delphine Joussein (of Nout trio), that already produced two live albums.

The musical union of Pohjonen and Swedish reed and electronics player Mats Gustafsson was envisioned by Bogdan Benigar, the director of Druga Godba festival in Ljubljana in Slovenia, who invited both of them to the 2024 edition of the festival, without letting them know that this was his plan. Gustafsson and Pohjonen bonded instantly. They share a love for ice hockey and saunas, and are motivated by a great passion - for spontaneous, risk-taking improvisations, creating a community, and cultivating individual and collective consciousness (as Gustafsson says: fighting against local and global stupidities). Throughout their live performances, they sounded like a powerful, raw, and intense sonic entity, Kimmats, and often Gustafsson’s saxes are channelled through Pohjonen’s effects.

Two Balls are Enough is the debut album of Pohjonen and Gustafsson, and it was recorded in a two-day session in Vienna in February 2026 by Martin Siewart (of Radian), with Pohjonen and Gustafsson responsible for the mix. Gustafsson brought to the recording session slide, tenor, baritone and bass saxes, Ab clarinet, flute and slide flute, live electronics, harmonica and organ, while Pohjonen played his electro-acoustic accordion and sang.

Each of the nine pieces sends you into unpredictable, uncompromising, deeply visceral, and wonderful hyperactive territories. Club dance pulse on steroids collides with ecstatic free jazz sax blows. Noisy electronics join a cathartic pagan dance, with Pohjonen’s organ-like chords ascending from hell to dance with Gustafsson’s garrulous baritone sax patterns. A poetic cinematic vision of a snowy Arctic storm. Experimenting with feedback-filled, mutated timbres. A touching, singable folk song. Three pieces were inspired by French poet Danielle Collobert. The last piece, “Backgrillen”, sketches a completely different texture from Gustafsson’s death jazz band, and offers a surprisingly intimate, touching melody filled with rustic beauty. It sounds like these Nordic wolves found a new pack of like-minded partner who enjoy creating a genre of their own.