Kronos Quartet: Uniko, Barbican, review Let's start with the good news: for the Barbican's freshly opened Contemporary Music season, things can only improve now that the UK premiere of Uniko has been despatched. This collaboration between the Kronos Quartet and the Finnish mavericks Kimmo Pohjonen and Samuli Kosminen arrived with a fair amount of expectation, but just 70 minutes later all that was left was the impression of an utterly mediocre easy-listening show, more crossover than contemporary. Self-styled as progressive but already sounding old hat, Uniko was first heard at the 2004 Helsinki Festival and has since made a few landings from Moscow to New York. Its seven movements are fairly indistinguishable, made up of the same basic ingredients. Live electro-accordion, voice and string quartet are all mixed with sampled accordion, strings and percussion and fed into a multilayered sonic environment that washes over the audience. Of course, "electrifying" a string quartet is nothing new, and nor are the techniques used in the ambient opening, where wispy sounds of the accordion breathing anticipate the key-scratching effects used later on. Pohjonen is famously a very physical performer, and one of his regular acts is accordion wrestling (this in a country that also invented wife-carrying competitions), vestiges of which seem to have found their way into this show. At least he is more interesting to watch than Kosminen, po-faced at his electronic percussion pad. It is sad that that accordion's wonderful potential goes untapped, and even such shards of sound as it produces here are effective only in the context of the bland overall soundscape. Equally, the quartet's simple riffs are momentarily haunting only because of the respite they supply, but they are desperately bland. Uniko may be "loosely connected to the concept of dreams," in the words of its composers Pohjonen and Kosminen, but its violent climaxes are more like the sampling of an Arctic wolves" pack or the nightmarish soundtrack of a Nordic thriller. Pohjonen also supplies some baritonal incantations in an attempt to evoke north-eastern musical traditions, but the results are nothing but empty terrain. Though the Kronos Quartet, celebrated for their all-inclusiveness and genre-bending range, have been involved in plenty of awful projects, it is difficult to know how they can live with this one. At least they had their backs to the screensaver visuals.