Nik Bärtsch' Ronin - Llyria

A somewhat less demanding interlude. I listened to Nik Bärtsch' latest and newly acquired CD - Llyria -  in the background, in order to get a feel for the new production. I don't think I like it quite as much as their previous two ECM recordings, Holon and Stoa.

Nik Bärtsch' Ronin is a Swiss band that produces an idiosyncratic mix of jazz, funk and minimalist music. The line up is as follows: Bärtsch himself on piano, Björn Meyer on bass, Andi Puppato on a mix of percussion, Sha on alto saxophone and bass clarinet, and Kaspar Rast on the drums.

Both their previous CDs have been at times in heavy rotation in the house. I have been really captivated by their very distinctive mix of coolheaded Swiss precision and control, improvisatory flair and volcanic drive. The best tracks are those where the band really gets into the groove, spinning long, rhythmically flexible meandering lines (à la Reich), that teasingly keep gyrating around an elusive climax. As in Reich the music is never static, never just a fix for trance junkies. But there is constant movement, instrumental details constantly flashing up, minute variations traversing the musical texture. The real star of the band for me is drummer Kaspar Reich who in a spectacular way embodies that combination of awesome precision, remarkable self-restraint and spine-tingling rhythmic drive (altogether rather Bartokian features!).

If I have a gripe about Holon and Stoa it is that there is not enough trance rather than too much. Tracks (all of which are titled as abstract 'Modules') last typically less than 10 minutes, never more than 15 minutes. This is the kind of music, it seems, that would benefit from longer tracks allowing the band to explore the material in more diversified ways, building in more and longer waves of rhythmic contraction and expansion. So I was disappointed to see that Modules on Llyria are all between 7 and 9 minutes. It's a different record from the other two too in the sense that it is more lyrical (as the title maybe suggests; on the other hand it also may refer to a recently discovered luminescent underwater creature). They are beautiful, mellow tracks, superbly played and very well recorded. A marvelous disc to chill out. But it's not quite why I'm listening to a Bärtsch gig. We are very well catered for this kind of very tasteful, polite and soothing music elsewhere in the ECM catalogue. What I want to hear on a Bärtsch disc are epic battles wherein violent energy is sublimated into masterful asceticism.

Llyria is different but it's also more of the same. Bärtsch shifts to another register but doesn't change his formula. And I'm afraid that it starts to sound a little formulaic. There is a fair amount of mythography going on around Bärtsch' Ronin. The master himself feeds these stories with his musings about Zen, martial arts, flocks of birds and schools of fish moving like giant clouds of organic matter. Then there's the band's curious discipline of playing a Monday evening concert in their same Zürich club every weeks, for years on end (they have over 300 performances behind them by now). All this is intriguing. But I wonder how long you can keep this up without it becoming a pose. We look keenly forward to Nik Bärtsch Ronin's next production, in about two years time.