Modul 8

The group MOBILE develops integral musical concepts within a ritualistic framework. The performance of the music is usually combined with a multi-medial set-up of the surrounding space.

Ronin around the world: a powerful and atmospheric concert recording with music captured in Germany, Austria, Holland, England, and Japan, a double-album which transmits the live impact of Nik Bärtsch’s band and its enveloping modular groove music of interlocking rhythms. It’s also a set that marks the end of an era and the transition into a new one. These are the last recordings of Ronin with Björn Meyer’s elegantly-leaping bass guitar as one of the lead voices, and Bärtsch views the album as partly a tribute to Meyer’s long tenure with the band. New bassist Thomy Jordi, meanwhile, makes an impressive entrance on “Modul 55”, but it’s most often the whole band, as a unified field of force, that commands the listener’s attention.

"Llyria" is the third album from Nik Bärtsch's Ronin and follows on from 'Stoa' and 'Holon', the ECM recordings that established the exciting young Swiss band on the international scene. Leader and pianist Nik Bärtsch's "modular" pieces still define the context of the group's music but the committed input of the individual Ronin members has lifted the work to the next level, blurring the distinctions between composition, improvisation and interpretation.