Rowan Lipkovits

Rowan Lipkovits is a performer based out of his hometown of Vancouver, Canada. Emerging from the late ’90s as a performance poet and composer of tracked .MODule music, he switched gears dramatically, putting his 15 years of piano lessons to strange new use when he followed the lead of Geoff Berner and picked up an accordion. A year later he realised he’d been trying to self-teach himself squeezebox upside-down, and things gathered momentum rapidly following a central tenet: since the standard repertoire had failed to thrill over the last several decades, he would instead perform renditions of modern songs that people were least likely to expect on the old-timey instrument — a kind of gimmick or trick to play on crowds based on overturning their expectations.

Adopting the credo of the cover performer (“you be original, I’ll be entertaining”), as his keyboard and vocal skills developed he found himself dramatically reinterpreting pop hits and casting them in a new light. Indulging a consular drive to be recognized as an ambassador of the misunderstood instrument, he became a media personality in December 2006 as part of the weekly Accordion Noir radio show / podcast.