Accordion Noir Theme Song Cover Extravaganza!

Greetings, Accordion Noir fans! We have before us a year of rolling 10th anniversaries ahead of us: Next September will see the 10th installment of the annual Accordion Noir Festival, but before that it’ll be the 10th anniversary of our Vancouver Squeezebox Circle in March. But coming up still sooner yet we have upcoming the 10th anniversary of the first weekly broadcast of Accordion Noir Radio, which began at 2 am in the middle of the night the first Wednesday of December. (These are all goals we set out in a manifesto for accordion world domination when we first began scheming to go on the radio: what would naturally follow?  We got as far as starting a festival, but then ran out of gas before opening a record label.)

We’ll be celebrating this occasion with a Very Noir All-Star accordion concert (about which we’ll say quite a bit more when we get closer to it), but for the benefit of our remote fans — the ones who enjoyed listening live to us in the morning or over their lunchbreak while it was 2 am local time — we wanted to give them a chance to participate in the celebrations also: another crack at a scheme I hatched 6 years ago.

We have a splendid theme song.  Composed about three years in to our ten year spree (so far), it’s an amazing composition by Andy Fielding that manages to encapsulate the spectrum of emotional possibilities on those accordions that we champion.  And as Andy himself once did a cover version of the (much-covered) theme song to the late Jurgen Gothe’s Disc Drive, we would like to invite our friends and fans to record and send in covers of our theme song. It gets played on our show every week, and we’d enjoy the chance to demonstrate the instrument’s range and versatility by having varied versions of the song to draw upon — on different kinds of squeezeboxes, in different registers, at different tempos, with different accompanying instrumentation, in different styles. You get the idea. Also, it gives us a chance to play you on the radio and put you before an uncountably vast audience over the airwaves and online.

To make it easy for you, we have full sheet music available for your perusal — at the top of this post, or downloadable locally as a .PDF over at http://bit.ly/ANthemesheet. And for those of you who aren’t visual learners, you can get a ballpark idea of what the canonical version of our theme song sounds like by listening to the master, its composer Andy Fielding, playing substantial flights of solo fancy in this long recording of the theme song right over at http://bit.ly/AccNoirtheme. (But you can try — in vain — to tighten it up and make it punchier if you want to go shorter-form.)

But really, we invite you to deviate from the norm, for the apple to fall quite some distance from the tree — you’re not going to out-Andy Andy, so you might as well play to your strengths and leave your own mark on the performance or the arrangement. Maybe you want to write some words for it and sing along? Take a crack at it! Taunt us by recording a performance entirely on non-free-reed-aerophone instruments? God bless you, you plucky little rebel. An a capella barbershop quartet arrangement? Well, I’m not sure why you would, but … knock yourself out!

And for you electronic musicians who wouldn’t otherwise be able to figure out where to plug a Cordovox into your patch bay, we are also interested in your remixes and mash-ups. If you inquire, we can provide stems (well, a keyboard track and a bass button track… and if we’re feeling really on the ball, a bellows-creaking track 8)

So your challenge is laid out before you: try to have a recording of your special rendition of our theme song (digital is best, MP3s are fine), in our hands by the last week of November. Cheers & squeeze on!