It's my favorite type of discovery--it defies description or genre categorization, it's different but not unwelcoming, and it never gets tiring as it reveals something new on subsequent listens while also falling into a comfortable familiarity. With Bärtsch's music in particular, it's a puzzle, it's mathematical precision, yet it's also organic and always changing.
If you're going alphabetical, you missed Awase (2018--the 18-minute "Modul 58" may be an overall favorite as I've played the digital version 117 times alone, and that's not counting the vinyl, or plays in the car), but Entendre, Holon, Live, Llyria, and Stoa are all coming up in the future. His earlier albums are not available on streaming, but they are much more repetitive and minimalist than what he recorded for ECM, where it really gelled.
Thom Jurek (one of my favorites, who I found out is local to me) from AllMusic tried to nail a description with Bärtsch's first ECM album...and I'll add a few paragraph breaks to make it more readable...
He may call it "Zen Funk," but the real question is, what the hell is it? Swiss pianist and composer Nik Bartsch's Ronin have issued their ECM debut, Stoa, the label well-known for its icy sounding, spacious jazz. ECM has been pushing the envelope for nearly 40 years, but with Ronin, they've pushed it beyond the pale into God knows what.This is not a bad thing, however. Ronin was a group created with the idea of playing live. And over the course of three previous records issued only in Europe, the band -- birthed in 2001 when Bartsch was 30 -- plays a highly disciplined style of music that relies on interlocking rhythm, groove, and groups of tight, short melodic statements all stacked on top of one another.There are those who will immediately think of Steve Reich's minimalist discipline, but there are no equations to be solved here. It's math music to be sure, but its also got the good foot, the deep bass, and the drum ostinatos of James Brown & His Famous Flames or the JB's, or even the deep soul tight backbeat toughness of the best Stax rhythm sections. Bartsch has listened to everything from Reich and Terry Riley to techno and the Necks (there is a beautiful nod to them at the beginning of the opener "Modul 36"). Bartsch's melodic ideas are trance-like and hypnotic. They come across more as rhythmic statements than actual melodic ideas. There are Eastern aesthetics at work here in the stripped-down elementalism in this music.It's full of discipline and is depersonalized so that the ensemble comes off as one voice. It's clear Bartsch has spent time listening to some of the best experimental electronic music by artists such as Apparat, Thomas Brinkmann, Pole, Basic Channel, and Pan Sonic. And while there is improvisation in Ronin's attack, it's structured and tightly woven into Bartsch's compositional structures.What makes the band tick is the rhythm section as Bartsch works his modulated and shuffled lyrical fragments against the section, assisted ably and minimally by Sha on contrabass and bass clarinets (who acts as another part of the rhythm section more than as a soloist or melodist). It's bassist Bjorn Meyer, percussionist Andi Pupato, and especially the brilliant drummer Kaspar Rast making it all happen in real time.
I had somehow not downloaded Awase. That's rectified and it's on deck (I tend to go back to the beginning of the alphabet when I add new stuff to hear those before picking up where I left off---which, if it hadn't been for Awase, would have been Janet Jackson's Control (more than a bit ironic this week).
