Arve Henriksen: Cartography (ECM 2086)

| Tyran Grillo

Cartography

Arve Henriksen
Cartography

Arve Henriksen trumpets, voice, field recording
Jan Bang live sampling, samples, beats, programming, bass line, dictaphone, organ samples, arrangement
Audun Kleive percussion, drums
David Sylvian voice, samples, programming
Helge Sunde string arrangement and programming
Eivind Aarset guitars
Lars Danielsson double-bass
Erik Honoré synthesizer, samples, field recordings, choir samples
Arnaud Mercier treatments
Trio Mediaeval voice sample
Vérène Andronikof vocals
Vytas Sondeckis vocal arrangement
Anna Maria Friman voice
Ståle Storløkken synthesizer, samples
Recorded, engineered and mixed at Punkt Studio, Kristiansand, except
Track 1
Recorded live at Punkt Festival, Kristiansand, June 2005
Overdubs recorded at Punkt Studio
Track 2, Part one
Recorded at Samadhisound
Trumpet recorded at 7.de Etage
Additional trumpet recorded at Punkt Studio
Track 10, Part Two
Recorded live at Punkt Festival, Kristiansand, August 2006
Track 11
Recorded live at Stadtgarten, Cologne
Assembled at Punkt Studio
Voice recorded at Samadhisound
Mastered at Audio Virus Lab, Oslo by Helge Sten
Engineered and produced by Erik Honoré and Jan Bang

After lurking as a figural, melodic force on many ECM sessions, at last Arve Henriksen dropped his unique brand of acid with Cartography. Although his place among Norway’s defining trumpeters—including Nils Petter Molvær, Per Jørgensen, and Mathias Eick—had already been firmly established, this leader date gave that badge some spit shine. As with his compatriots, electronics are a vital part of his toolkit, and here the incorporation achieves new levels of organicity courtesy of associates Erik Honoré and Jan Bang, who has contributed equally memorable soundscaping to the work of Eivind Aarset (see his recent Dream Logic), Jon Hassell (a huge influence on Henriksen), and singer-songwriter David Sylvian. In fact, Sylvian appears twice on this disc, bringing his idiosyncratic wordsmithery to bear on some amorphous territory. In “Before And Afterlife,” his speech is split and stitched, flashing cosmopolitan utterances across rural stages. The silvery ebb and flow running through Henriksen’s trailing commentary tilling the soil gently in his wake. “Thermal” further sets Sylvian’s stunning poetry of object-oriented diaspora in motion.

Henriksen
Photo credit: Oliver Heisch

With such evocations of land, (un)settlement, and water, the album’s title might seem an obvious one: the art of mapmaking translated into sound, comprising a trans-idiomatic survey recorded in multiple locations. To be sure, such connotations abound. Whether floating through the gossamer electronic spread of “Poverty And Its Opposite” or hooked by the widening beat of “Migration,” Henriksen moves through thick clouds with surety of calibration. The sense of continuity in his trumpeting evokes a romantic sort of cinema, a feeling of sustained emotional lift and robust physicality.

Henriksen is indeed often the focal center—sometimes of ambient rustlings and digitalia, sometimes tracing the shadows of voices, sometimes diving headlong into them. In the latter vein is “Recording Angel,” which samples the singing group Trio Mediaeval in a half-conscious sleep. The effect is eerily similar to Stephan Mathieu and Janek Schaefer’s Hidden Name (2006, Crónica), which was created using source material from composer John Tavener’s personal record collection. Words waver in and out of consciousness, swapping exigencies and feeling patterns. Through this goopy mixture, Henriken’s lines glide like water snakes, blind yet ever attentive to their food source.

The album also veers into deeply personal spaces, as in “The Unremarkable Child,” a short and dulcet piece with an orchestral backdrop, swaying and mellifluous. “Sorrow And Its Opposite” is likewise inward looking, revealing Henriksen’s warmth to the utmost against a shifting assemblage of upheavals, a ballad for time immemorial, for the enchantment within and the whispers without. A piano turns like an Escherian helix, until only the sounds of footsteps remain. Therein lies the real cartography: a form of travel not across tactile surfaces but through ghosts of mortal ends.

Another one of ECM’s finest.

Jon Hassell: Last night the moon came dropping its clothes in the street (ECM 2077)

| Tyran Grillo

Last night the moon came

Jon Hassell
Last night the moon came dropping its clothes in the street

Jon Hassell trumpet, keyboard
Peter Freeman bass, laptop
Jan Bang live sampling
Jamie Muhoberac keyboard, laptop
Rick Cox guitar, loops
Kheir Eddine M’Kachiche violin
Eivind Aarset guitar
Helge Andreas Norbakken drums
Pete Lockett drums
Recorded April 2008, Studios La Buissonne, Pernes-les-Fontaines
Engineers: Gérard de Haro and Nicolas Bailla
“Courtrais” recorded live in Courtrais, Belgium
“Abu Gil,” “Northline,” and “Light On Water” recorded live at Kings Place, London, November 2008
Produced by Manfred Eicher and Jon Hassell
Mixed by Peter Freeman in Los Angeles, Nov/Dec 2008

Not only does Last night the moon came dropping its clothes in the street carry the most evocative title in the ECM catalogue, it also closes a 25-year gap between trumpeter-composer Jon Hassell’s first label date, 1986’s Power Spot. About said title, one need only know it comes from the poetry of 13th-century Sufi mystic Rumi to find insight into the music it indicates. Rumi’s embodiment of spiritual evolution is, much like Hassell’s artistry, a parthenogenetic organism: it nurtures itself, grows with and through itself over time.

Last night the moon came… is in many ways the ambient underbelly of Nils Petter Molvær’s Khmer and is sure to enchant fans of the same. The soupiness of his sound is in full effect here, opening to an attunement of the cosmos that uses sun flares as its ink and comet tails as is brushes—a sound honed over eons and realized through the breath of an artist whose own universalism speaks in cosmic, singing electricity. Yet the more we listen to this music, the more we realize it comes from a space within rather than without, a space found not through the telescope but through the microscope.

The presence of violin, for example—courtesy of Kheir Eddine M’Kachiche, whom Hassell encountered on SIWAN—is a deeply biological one. M’Kachiche’s ghostly mitochondria snake their way through an outer-to-inner progression that smoothes within earshot in the introductory “Aurora” and fades from it in the pale of “Light On Water.” At first, the trumpet is tucked safely away in some inter-dimensional pocket, making its first appearance only in the appropriately titled “Time And Place,” a fraternal tone to the violin’s sisterly wisdom. With the music’s x- and y-axes thus established, we have free fall.

Balance of the unplugged and the wired, of matter and ether, continues throughout. The sense of patience is nocturnal indeed, the song of Hassell’s instrument multifaceted and luminous. The overall effect is one of perpetual exhale. Tasteful applications of instruments mark the path with cohesive memories. Sections such as “Clairvoyance” trace their development by the same clock yet spin their tails in more subterranean designs, diurnal and flowering, while the bass of “Courtrais” throbs just overhead, yielding like a suspension bridge during an earthquake. Purely descriptive moments are rare. Rather, the flow proceeds by way of feel. “Blue Period” is perhaps the closest we get to a painterly aesthetic, the height of Hassell’s reach evoking a bird of prey surveying the territory below as if it were its own body, splayed and stretched to the span of a continent. Like the drumming in the album’s concluding steps, it makes fleeting contact with land, shifting from shadow to shadow, half here and half gone.

The word “atmospheric” was invented for music like this.

Andy Sheppard: Movements in Colour (ECM 2062)

| Tyran Grillo

Movements in Colour

Andy Sheppard
Movements in Colour

Andy Sheppard soprano and tenor saxophones
John Parricelli acoustic and electric guitars
Eivind Aarset guitar, electronics
Arild Andersen double-bass, electronics
Kuljit Bhamra tabla, percussion
Recorded February 2008, Studios La Buissonne, Pernes-les-Fontaines
Recording engineer: Gérard de Haro
Assistant: Nicolas Baillard
Mixed January 2009 by Gérard de Haro, Manfred Eicher, and Andy Sheppard
Produced by Manfred Eicher

British saxophonist Andy Sheppard’s ECM debut is a phenomenon in sound. A musician of remarkable integrity, Sheppard takes full advantage of the opportunity to broaden his reach farther than ever before. For this project, he indulges in his Indian, African, and Latin affinities, as reflected in the eclectic lineup that shapes this set into something greater than the sum of its parts. Guitarists John Parricelli (last heard on Kenny Wheeler’s A Long Time Ago) and Eivind Aarset weave acoustic and electronic impulses into a yielding web of support throughout; Arild Andersen, a bassist who can do no wrong, brings melodic heft to what might otherwise have been a supporting role; and tabla master Kuljit Bhamra makes his only ECM appearance in a fine showing of percussive breadth.

Sheppard himself likens Movements in Colour to a dream made realizable only through the fit of its talent. In this respect, Bhamra is a revelation. Encounters with tabla in a jazz context are sure to inspire memories of Collin Walcott’s all-too-short career, but here the results are more akin to Charles Lloyd’s powerful Sangam trio with Eric Harland and Zakir Hussain. Bhamra’s entrance in the 15-minute opener “La Tristesse Du Roi” touches off an intimate symphony, more figural than instrumental. Light-footed yet secure, his stitching keeps the sky from blowing away like a cloth in a cosmic sneeze. Gorgeous bassing and keening electric guitar add a dual coat of ash and flame to the eggshell of this freshly hatched bird. Andersen stands out early on, tracing our ears as would a master painter lay down the underdrawing. His contributions continue to shine as fully embodied images, even from beneath the layers of Sheppard’s melodic gifts.

The album’s compositions—fully Sheppard originals—are its lifeblood. “Bing” is a particularly luminescent example. Bhamra and Sheppard play beautifully off each other, while Parricelli adds cosmic sheen. Ghosts of influence haunt this and other tunes. One might trace lines of flight back to Jan Garbarek, whose muscled lyricism echoes in “Nave Nave Moe” and “May Song,” although the music is quintessentially Sheppard’s own. Deeper contacts abound in “Ballarina,” which by virtue of its shaded, waltzing comportment sounds like a Paul Motian sketch.

The final two tracks of the disc, “We Shall Not Go To Market Today” and “International Blue,” give offering to land and sky, respectively. Where one is a patch of sunlight on misty canvas, thus hinting at spring thaw with its celebratory undercurrent, the other floats Sheppard’s insights over Aarset’s wash of electricity. Andersen gives foothold throughout, indicating only barely the wistfulness of things.

Affirmative and healing, Movements in Colour is a collect call from the ether. Sheppard’s virtuosity is such that one hardly feels the focus and effort required to translate the messages thereof. His mastery of the saxophone’s periphery in particular breathes like the rest of us, singing even as it speaks.

By far one of ECM’s best of the new millennium.

Batagraf/Jon Balke: Statements (ECM 1932)

| Tyran Grillo

Statements

Batagraf
Jon Balke
Statements

Frode Nymo alto saxophone
Kenneth Ekornes percussion
Harald Skullerud percussion
Helge Andreas Norbakken percussion
Ingar Zach percussion
Jon Balke keyboards, percussion, vocals, sound processing
Arve Henriksen trumpet
Sidsel Endresen text recitals in English
Miki N´Doye text recital in Wolof
Solveig Slettahjell vocals
Jocely Sete Camara Silva voice
Jennifer Myskja Balke voice
Recorded 2003 and 2004 at “Bugge’s Room” by Andy Miteis
Mixed at “7. Etasje” by Reidar Skår
Mastered at “Lydlab” by Ulf Holand
Produced by Jon Balke

Statements represents a leap in intuition for pianist Jon Balke, who by way of his self-styled “private research forum” Batagraf holds a meeting of percussionists Kenneth Ekornes, Harald Skullerud, Helge Andreas Norbakken, and Ingar Zach, along with Frode Nymo on alto saxophone, trumpeter Arve Henriksen, and an array of voices that includes label familiars Sidsel Endresen and Miki N’Doye, the latter making his second ECM appearance (his first: Balke’s Nonsentration) and here not as percussionist but as poet, reciting texts in the language of the Wolof people of West Africa. As one of ECM’s most up close and personal records (there’s hardly any reverb to speak of), Statements unfolds nakedly, transcending the heavy touch of technology in favor of the freer language of acoustic drums. Indeed, language flows through this project like blood, whether through actual or implied speech.

N’Doye is a defining presence early on in the program, which opens with the spliced diction of “Haomanna.” Seemingly engaged in one-sided antiphony, he inhales savanna and exhales urban networks, barely stitching the lines of keyboard and saxophone trading places at the periphery. Nymo’s parasitic reed work locates further hosts throughout, threading needles through the geographical mash-up of “Altiett” and careening freely across the open skies of “Whistleblower.”

Despite its organic charge, Statements occasionally dresses itself in the peculiar fashion of postproduction. The mélange of instruments and distorted speech that is “En vuelo” reveals wires for veins. “Doublespeak” refracts likewise. Less Orwellian nightmare than Aristotelian breakdown, its word choice flirts with impropriety. Another example in this regard is “Pregoneras del bosque,” a bazaar of the mind whose fruit is weighed by the emotion. Electronic beats and croaks share the air with live murmurings of hand on drum. The final triptych, however, forms the pièce de resistance. In “Pajaro” toddling echoes of childhood linger against a din of buzz saws and insects. All of this encrypts the data entry point of “Karagong,” an archival glitch that reveals its skeleton in “Unknown.” Here uncertainty is the norm, a world through which denizens go on teetering for another hit of oxygen. This is the new ecology, a scrape of survival, anointed by fear.

Statements again proves Balke to be one of the most consistently surprising and uncompromising artists in ECM’s stable. Those seeking points of comparison to this particular disc may find them in “Betong,” for which the closest analogue would be the proliferations of the late Bryn Jones (1961-1999), a.k.a. Muslimgauze, bonded as it is by a likeminded politics and disdain for injurious media, spoken through the drum. In both is a misunderstood flag that flaps only when the wind of our attention shifts its way.

Jon Balke/Amina Alaoui: SIWAN (ECM 2042)

| Tyran Grillo

Siwan

SIWAN

Amina Alaoui vocal
Jon Hassell trumpet, electronics
Kheir Eddine M’Kachiche violin
Jon Balke keyboards, conductor
Helge Andreas Norbakken percussion
Pedram Khavar Zamini zarb
Barokksolistene
Bjarte Eike leader
Recorded September 2007 and March 2008 at Rainbow Studio, Oslo
Engineers: Jan Erik Kongshaug and Peer Espen Ursfjord
Mixed September 2008 by Manfred Eicher, Jon Balke, Amina Alaoui, and Jan Erik Kongshaug
Produced by Manfred Eicher and Jon Balke

“Siwan” connotes equilibrium. This album of the same name achieves equilibrium through many meetings and intersections: of Norwegian pianist Jon Balke and Moroccan singer Amina Alaoui (in her first ECM appearance), of Baroque and Andalusian musical idioms, of Sufi poetry and Christian mysticism, of dark ages and burning inquisitions. For this studio recording of resolutely live music, Balke doubles as keyboardist and conductor for a veritably intergalactic ensemble that includes Algerian violinist Kheir Eddine M’Kachiche, American trumpeter Jon Hassell, and Norwegian violinist Bjarte Eike’s period group Barokksolistene.

Like Alaoui’s seminal Arco Iris, this project is not a fusion of traditions. It is, rather, a deepening of common ground between them. A work of stunning originality, blending geographies into a single airborne continent, its ecosystem runs on ether. Like the solo violin buoyed by strings in the program’s introductory “Tuchia,” the whole flexes and ornaments itself organically. In that violin is a heartbreaking softness that conforms itself to all manner of densities in what follows. After such a fecund inauguration, it is no wonder that the first proper song, “O Andalusin,” should extol the natural wonders of Al-Andalus. Elegiacally described by poet Ibrahim Ibn Khafaja (1058-1139) as “the Eden of the chosen,” the paradisiacal wonders of its landscape shine forth. Harpsichord claws burrow into ocean floor even as Alaoui unfurls sails, hang-gliders, and other disembodied wings to catch every possible current. From burrowing to dislocation, traveler Abu Abdallah Al-Homai’di (1029-1095) yearns for that “faraway homeland” in his poem “Jadwa.” A filigree of percussion and lute illuminates the night as would gold leaf a sacred manuscript, audible tethers each between body and home. Alaoui’s voice wanders but holds its resolve so tightly to bosom that it slips into the ribcage, where it swings on a perch of belonging. She is positively flute-like in wordless moments, touching off M’Kachiche’s elliptical storytelling against a tense ostinato.

The words of Al-Mu’tamid Ibn Abbad (1040-1095), poet-king of Seville, strangely echo the deposition that would incarcerate him for the last five years of his life. “Ya Safwati” is a romantic verse, a profession of utter surrender to that universal captor known as love. This song fronts Jon Hassell’s signature vocality and falls like a curtain to reveal a bevy of percussion carrying Alaoui like a Sherpa across mountains of history. “Itimad” names the wife of Al-Mu’tamid Ibn Abbad, to whom he slipped this poem through the bars of the neighboring cell. “I am untamable yet you dominate me,” he professes, again echoing the power of emotion to conquer in soul what can never be conquered in flesh. Alaoui moves like a bow and finds herself accompanied by that very object, animated and free, across a burial ground of song. Troubador Martín Codax (13/14th century) is similarly lovestruck in his “Ondas do mar de Vigo,” only here the poet embodies a proto-female who laments the consignment of her loved ones to the Sea of Vigo, whose waves took many in the crusades.

Lope de Vega (1562-1635), a star poet of the Spanish golden age, delights with the phonetic play of “A la dina dana.” Here Alaoui parts the clouds by way of golden, celebratory light, setting up the instrumental contrasts of “Zahori” (featuring lyrical recorder playing in place of text), flowing with all the threat of a poisonous serpent, minus the fangs. The lute’s cross-cultural pedigree comes through most readily and beckons the singing of “Ashiyin Raïqin.” Penned by Abu Abdallah Ibn Ghalib Al-Rusafi (d. 1177), who in her liner notes Alaoui describes as a hedonistic writer, this painterly song indeed strips pleasure of its sin. “How lucky we are to find this spot for our sojourn / with doves cooing for our greater delight”: a sentiment within a sentiment, planted in a garden of mirrors.

Persian-born Sufi mystic Husayn Mansur Al-Hallaj (857-922), who suffered martyrdom on the cross for his profession of godliness and who was a beacon of inspiration for Rumi, outlines the manifold path to what Alaoui calls “a ceaseless transformation through vital alternation.” It is a state of fluctuating being in which the contemplation of silence, if not the silence of contemplation, gives way to discovery. A “stripping bare,” as the poet phrases it, an instinct without a door.

“Thulâthiyat” features Alaoui in narrative mode. She lays her speech on the sands like dry bones of an augury for the here and now. Caring neither for past nor for future, she drinks them for the illusions they are and expels them along with the sweat of the midday heat. Sunlit, too, is the verse-chain “Toda ciencia trascendiendo” (Rising beyond all science) of San Juan de la Cruz (1542-1591). This concluding piece is, in Alaoui’s estimation, one of the finest examples of Christian mysticism. Even without knowledge of text and translation, the present arrangement would have us know its secrets. Here there is a door, forged not of wood-flesh but of heart-mind, an analysis of slumber illuminated from within that records its footsteps for posterity before they are buried by wind and dust.

Alaoui’s melodic settings of these lyrics are so intuitive, it’s as if the notes preceded the words. In combination with the astonishing forces gathered around her, every turning of the tongue unspools a thread into the soul.

One of ECM’s finest releases. Ever.

(To hear samples of Siwan, click here.)

Jon Balke: Book of Velocities (ECM 2010)

| Tyran Grillo

Book of Velocities

Jon Balke
Book of Velocities

Jon Balke piano
Recorded September 2006 at Radio Studio DRS, Zürich
Engineer: Markus Heiland
Produced by Manfred Eicher

“We believe that mere movement is life, and that the more velocity it has, the more it expresses vitality.”
–Rabindranath Tagore

Tagore’s statement harbors an implicit question: Does vitality necessarily correlate with velocity? Wittingly or not, Jon Balke would seem to have an answer in this unique album. After a series of memorable appearances on ECM as sideman and group leader (notably, in the latter vein, with his Magnetic North Orchestra), we at last find the Norwegian pianist unaccompanied. The title alone is enough to place the music in a modern tradition of fragmentary collections: Bartók’s Mikrokosmos and Kurtág’s Játékok come most immediately to mind. Yet listening to what Balke has done with both form and instrument, one quickly realizes the profundity of his crafting.

Divided into four Chapters and an Epilogue, Book of Velocities extricates the finer implications of its elements—improvised and composed alike—via thorough examination of the piano itself. By way of introduction, “Giada” flutters between plucked piano strings and dotted punctuations at the keyboard proper. The descriptive cast of “Scintilla” that follows sets the stage for a procession of dreamlike actors, each a cipher for something elemental and transfigured. Other examples in this regard include “Single Line” and “Double Line,” “Gum Bounce,” and the nail-scratched mysteries of “Finger Bass,” the latter droning in Gurdjieff-like meditation.

Many pieces, like the penultimate “Sonance,” exert an organic influence of exhale and inhale, of speech and pause. Indeed, the deepest moments are those least audible, as in the non-invasive contact of “Resilience,” in which one finds the piano’s fantasy life made real. The bodily nature of the music thus shines at carefully selected moments of expression. Whether in the substrate of its own becoming or in the opacity of its outer skin, Balke’s language refashions grammar through every contour. In this respect, the poignant “Drape Hanger” is among the more precious turns of phrase and foreshadows the photorealism of “Scrim Stand,” undulating in real time.

The mirrors of this disc are more than reflective; they are embodied, a dance between beauty and blues. Slowly and surely, Balke turns paths of teardrops into channels of blood flow. This is his art distilled in a crucible of origins until pure feeling remains. It transcends the need for means and returns to the sky whence it came.

Nik Bärtsch’s Ronin: Holon (ECM 2049)

| Tyran Grillo

Holon

Nik Bärtsch’s Ronin
Holon

Nik Bärtsch piano
Sha bass clarinets, alto saxophone
Björn Meyer bass
Kaspar Rast drums
Andi Pupato percussion
Recorded July 2007, Studios La Buissonne, Pernes-les-Fontaines
Engineer: Gérard de Haro
Produced by Manfred Eicher

“A band should mature into an integral organism—then it is alive, like an animal, a biotope, an urban space.”
–Nik Bärtsch

With the release of its ECM debut, Stoa, Nik Bärtsch’s Ronin hit the air flying with its meticulous brand of Zen-funk. Two years and eons of experience later, we have Holon, the title of which reveals the band’s underlying ethos: that which is simultaneously part and whole. The beats of this sophomore studio effort are no less regular than those of their predecessor, but now there is something more unitary and, as Bärtsch himself observes above, downright biological going on. Such wording is no mere metaphor, but a lived reality helped along by the decidedly acoustic mix (only Björn Meyer’s bass is plugged), as well as by the fearless integration the group has honed over countless hours of playing as one.

“Modul 42” is where Ronin’s openness comes most explicitly into play. It is an aural body built around contrasting elements. Sparkle and shadow, peace and unrest, freshness and decay—all of these intermingle in recurring dreams, inflected slightly differently with each repetition. Here and elsewhere on the album, Bärtsch’s contact inside the piano reveals a percussive, resonant core less obvious in previous recordings: a staple of his performance style since.

“Modul 41_17” is the first of two transfusions, this one offsetting the same earlier Modul 17 that was dovetailed with 38 on Stoa. Set atop a spinning plate of two notes, Meyer’s contemplative spirals join with others in the fray, cohering into a veritable golem of groove. One can almost feel the platelets conjoining in renewed life as the elements shift and sway to the pulse of some physiological alterity, which marks by its upward chromatic swings the flexion of something divinely ordered. Bärtsch’s dampened finger tapping looses sonic sponges, which soak up all the surrounding water until nothing is left. The second pairing, “Modul 39_8,” is among Bärtsch’s most enchanting. A delicate chemical infusion, it strikes the ether as if it were a matchbook.

“Modul 46” is a blush of autumnal nostalgia that proceeds by delicate propulsions. From the enchanting pianism to the underlay of rhythmatists Kaspar Rast and Andi Pupato, Meyer’s rounded spine and reedist Sha’s tender pocket, this especially jazzy module builds to a luminescent peak.

Rhythmic stacking continues to be a leitmotif of Bärtsch’s vocabulary, and the corridors of “Modul 45” are noteworthy in this regard. Anchored by a rubbery bass and smoothed by interplay between piano and saxophone, it slows into utter transcendence, balancing the piano’s reflective highs with Meyer’s twangs of reconciliation before opening into a stretch of desert music. Sha’s yodeling saxophone cleaves the night with rifts of ebony, while Bärtsch’s solo epilogue reveals nakedness beneath an outer skin.

“Modul 44” tells the story of the former’s slumber, not a dream but a sleepwalk through vestiges of time and space. This is a skeletal creation, a constellation that maps an intergalactic railroad ridden by remnants of ethers whose tickets have yet to be punched.

Call the music of Ronin whatever you will. I call it a jamming of dark matter that abides by its own string theory, and which through self-absorption finds an alternate identity waiting in the wings. One flap, and its echo is felt galaxies away.

Nik Bärtsch’s Ronin: Stoa (ECM 1939)

| Tyran Grillo

Stoa

Nik Bärtsch’s Ronin
Stoa

Nik Bärtsch piano
Sha contrabass and bass clarinets
Björn Meyer bass
Kaspar Rast drums
Andi Pupato percussion
Recorded May 2005, Studios La Buissonne, Pernes-les-Fontaines
Engineer: Gérard de Haro
Produced by Manfred Eicher

“The rule of Japanese martial arts is: think with your body.”
–Nik Bärtsch

With Stoa, Nik Bärtsch’s Ronin dropped into the pond of ECM—indeed, of the world—with profoundly concentric ripples. Listeners can be thankful the effects of those ripples have yet to dissipate, and can only hope decades’ worth more from this nonpareil collective awaits. Pianist Bärtsch drafted the architecture of Stoa while in Japan, the enigmatic and fiercely vivid culture of which had long been the philosophical foundation of his work, yet which remained distant to him until fortune brought him there during the rainy season of 2003.

The formula of Ronin is rooted in the “module,” a molecular prism of being through which Bärtsch’s headstrong quintet splashes light. “Modul 36” thus opens the program with the intermittent glow of a harmonic piano hit, tolling the hour with fallacies of salutation. The only things tangible in these inaugural stirrings are those lone hands at the keyboard. Divorced from body, they step even as they hold themselves against the chill. Wrists plant themselves in the first patches of soil they come to, glowing like eyes in the black ice. Their fingers stretch into branches, from which scatter the blossoms of Ronin’s melodic art proper.

More than any Ronin album since, Stoa measures its respiration in clear-cut rhythmic overlay—this courtesy of drummer Kaspar Rast and percussionist Andi Pupato—with phenomenally engaging results. The stealthy bass of Björn Meyer in “Modul 33” sets off the deepest chain reaction in this regard, followed in kind by the piano’s upper register, Rast’s careful flurry, and the popping bass clarinet of reedist Sha. Overlapping circles, squares, and triangles—each the essence of a different spiritual idea—dance in lockstep toward densities in the latter half. A solid bass line muscles through the smog with finesse. Even subtler syncopations abound in “Modul 32.” Phasing heart rates with magical depressions, it braids the air of the studio with timelessness. From planetary to nebular, its hip-rocking moves evoke the gait of a tireless nomad who has found that middle ground by which to renounce any claims to territory.

“Modul 35” is classically urban Ronin, a world of revolving doors and robotic drones, whose mouths open and close to the tune of cash registers and credit swipes. Yet hovering around these bar-coded souls is a guardian angel of repose, one that counts not tender but connections on its fingers and who speaks through Bärtsch’s own fingers in pylons of light. Microtonal lifts from Meyer add spongy evanescence. Similar contrasts abound in the finishing “Modul 38_17,” another mechanistic fantasy that cuts a line through landscape like a bullet train—which is to stay, smoothly and with barest indications of its actual speed. Winds follow, rolling like the hills in denser chord voicings here. A gorgeously minimal flavor laces the proceedings with tension, urgency growing like a beard on the face of change. Before long that sense of speed catches up with us and tousles our hair, keeping sleep at bay with the sheer energy of self-realization and pulsing through to silence, as resolute as it is fragile.

What we have, then, is not a journey, per se. Instead, a flame rejuvenating itself with every flicker. It travels down the match, edging ever closer to bare fingertips until a gasp of pain and shaking hand offer its ashen frame to the water. But its smoke trails upward yet, the final tether between flesh and firmament.