Welcome to installment #2 of Listen/Here. As a reminder, I’m picking randomly from recently purchased albums and writing short reviews, modeled, somewhat, on the Reading Well posts.
Today, we’re listening to SPIN, a 2024 release from Nik Bärtsch’s Ronin (spelled Baertsch in locales that don’t use an umlaut–including his website. Here is his wikipedia page.)
I don’t remember when I first ran across Nik Bärtsch’s Ronin (it’s a bit of an awkward moniker, but there ya’ go), but I think it was about a decade ago. The music made me sit up and take notice: there is something about it that elevates it above the field. It’s clearly highly structured–Bärtsch calls each piece a modul, and they are simply numbered, and I think every track I’ve heard has a repetitive, propulsive, build to it, constructed around Bärtsch’s keyboard work, but always sharing the spotlight, especially with Sha on reeds.
These are long-form compositions, ranging from 10 (ish) to 15 (ish) minutes each, totally instrumental.
Bärtsch’s moduls feel like what might happen if jazz and post-rock had a wonderfully gifted child who was strongly attracted to structure, form, and rhythmic play. That’s right up my ally.
I suspect the secret sauce is jazz, that is, while there aren’t really traditional jazz structures here–no extended solos, for example–there is a complexity, a resistance to strict repetition and an overall attention that craft that speaks, I would guess, to training steeped deeply in those traditions.
It’s all a bit enthralling, especially when, as in Modul 66, Modul 70-51 (evidently a reworking of an earlier piece–IDK, I’m not that deep into the lore of Ronin and the moduls), the groove gets going. This also happens in spectacular fashion in the second halves of Modul 14 and Modul 23.
Favorite Track: There is what may very well be a weakness of the project in that, ultimately, there is a similarity that makes them hard to distinguish. But the second half of Modul 23 is such a great build and finale, I’ll go with that.
SPIN (2024).
Nik Bärtsch: piano, keyboard
Sha: bass clarinet, alto saxophone
Jeremias Keller: bass
Kaspar Rast: drums
https://shorturl.fm/tdVqk