Nik Bärtsch's Ronin

[Chicago Expat]

his clinically clean sound world turns me off.

That's very understandable. I would imagine others would feel similarly. I think part of the appeal of Ronin's sound to me is that the austerity of his sound provokes an underlying anxiousness in me while I listen, leaving me feeling like I'm watching a movie that I know is going to have an unhappy ending but I enjoy the way the story is being told until it gets there. But I could see how some people wouldn't much care for that.

[GregK]

I liked Stoa the best, maybe because he was playing electric piano and acoustic piano on that one. He dropped the electric for the next two ECM titles, and they also got funkier (and less interesting, to me). Stoa seems a little more spacy. The newest one, Llyria, has not interested me enough to go back to it after several listens since it came out.