Transparent Productions welcomes back Nik Bärtsch’s Ronin with DC's Janel and Anthony opening.
Tuesday March 24th at Palisades Hub at 5200 Cathedral Ave. NW, Washington DC Doors at 7:00PM, music at 7:30PM. Admission $30. Advance Tickets.
Nik Bärtsch’s Ronin: Nik Bärtsch (piano), Sha (bass clarinet, alto saxophone), Jeremias Keller (bass), Kaspar Rast (drums).
Janel and Anthiony: Janel Leppin (cello, electronics, voice), Anthony Pirog (guitar)
With the zen-funk quartet RONIN founded in 2001, Nik Bärtsch proceeds with the work on his RITUAL GROOVE MUSIC together with Kaspar Rast (drums), Jeremias Keller (he replaced Thomy Jordi in 2020, who replaced Björn Meyer on the bass in 2011) and Sha (bass/contrabass clarinet. Percussionist Andi Pupato joined the band 2002-2012). Their music consistently follows the same aesthetic vision under various instrumental guises: creating the maximum effect by minimal means.
Despite the multiplicity of the band’s influences, Ronin’s music always possesses a strong individuality. They incorporate elements of disparate musical worlds, be they funk, new classical music or sounds from Japanese ritual music.
However, these forms are never merely juxtaposed in a post-modernist fashion but instead amalgamated into a coherent new style. Ultimately, these sounds and rhythms are highly idiosyncratic. The music consists of very few phrases and motives, continually combined and layered in new ways. Ronin thus creates a consistent aesthetic across all levels of musical expression. Composition, phrasing, sound structure, performance, and musical form all combine to form a system of interrelated elements. (Michel Mettler)
Their latest recording is Spin on Ronin Rhythm Records.
My favorite set from the entire four-day event (Big Ears Festival 2024) –and probably one of my top shows ever – came Thursday evening with Nik Bärtsch’s Ronin –SPIN MAGAZINE / Ryan Reed
On paper, Ronin is a standard quartet of reeds, keyboards, bass, and drums. What they play though is both unique and universal....what you hear is astonishingly funky and hip. – STAR-REVUE.com / George Grella.
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Hugely influential and appearing nearly everywhere within Washington D.C.'s contemporary music scene as bandleaders and contributing artistic voices, cellist and vocalist Janel Leppin and guitarist Anthony Pirog have long been creative partners as well as life partners.
Their Cuneiform Records debut Where is Home (2012) is considered a crucial modern recording from the region. Following that release, the two have crafted a double-LP opus which crosses genres and mirrors their exploratory and dialogic working methods. New Moon in the Evil Age is their long-awaited follow up to Where is Home and will have immediate appeal to fans of beyond jazz, modern composition and improvisation, indie music, and of D.C musical culture.
Janel and Anthony make it clear in conversation that New Moon in the Evil Age is a harbinger of things to come as well as the distillation of a twenty year process. This recording is only their third as a duo and this fact is somewhat surprising given the fact that they often pair up on each other’s various recorded and live projects. They have both been exceptionally active over the past decade since the release of Where Is Home.
Leppin leads and composes for the revered jazz group Ensemble Volcanic Ash, releasing a celebrated solo cello record called The Brink, and three solo vocal and synthesizer albums. Leppin led and arranged music for The Heart Sutra, an ensemble that presented works by pedal steel guitarist and composer Susan Alcorn, and also has recorded with artists including Oren Ambarchi, Eyvind Kang, Priests, Marissa Nadler and Rose Windows for labels such as Tzadik, Sub Pop, Sacred Bones, Bella Union and Touch. Additionally, Leppin toured as the bassist and synthesist for D.C. based post-punk band Priests and as a cellist, vocalist, and synthesist with Marissa Nadler.
Pirog founded the stellar trio Messthetics with ex-Fugazi bassist Joe Lally and drummer Brendan Canty (with records on Dischord and Impulse!), which has also recently featured saxophonist James Brandon Lewis, and released Pocket Poem, Palo Colorado Dream and other records as a leader. He has recorded as a collaborator with Henry Kaiser, Jeff Sipe, Michael Formanek, Andy West, William Hooker, Dave Ballou, Mike Pride and Jeremy Enigk. As Pirog notes, “This band has always been a priority for us. We’ve been chipping away at the new record whenever we could, despite life intervening! We're looking forward to having the opportunity to prioritize our duo music, because we’ve done so much in between our records in terms of performances and planning.”
The 19 tracks of New Moon In The Evil Age, like the years it took to record it, flash by rather quickly, which is a testament to their vision and working process. Though organizing an opus takes time, a number of the pieces were written in short order, as the duo has a language and methodology so finely tuned that compositions can materialize with little provocation. Pirog observes, “We don’t even have to speak; we’re bringing certain ideas we’ve developed over twenty years of working and being together, which makes it so easy, because we really just sit down and music comes out.”
The album has a pretty clear division point, given that the first ten tracks are instrumental while the remaining nine are vocal and electronics-heavy. Rather than interpolating and ping-ponging sensibilities from song to song, the arc from soaring string interplay to synth-driven layered avant-pop is clear. Leppin remarks that, “This album is organic to us. We’ve never wanted to align to any particular genre and we try and avoid limitations in our music."
When interviewing Leppin and Pirog, they hold space for and support one another’s answers and ideas about their music, patient but illuminative. That goes for their playing too – it’s an environment of creative merger, sonic voices buoyed and intertwined, forceful but never overpowering. Most of the instruments are played by Janel and Anthony – cello and guitar, of course, with the addition of a bank of synthesizers (mellotron, Prophet 6, string six), piano, koto, and percussion. The duo’s palette is supplanted by the daf and tonbak of Dr. Ali Reza Analouei, a collaborator of Leppin’s in a Persian classical ensemble, and the bass of Devra Hoff.
Another factor in their unity of thought and of their sound heard here is emphasized through their long working relationship with The Brink recording studio and its engineer Mike Reina, of which Leppin observes, “The Brink is a huge part of Janel and Anthony records. We think of The Brink as a musical home and a place of freedom. We like to explore sonic textures in the studio. Mike will go to the ends of the earth for tone.”
Repeated listening to these nineteen tracks will reveal layers upon layers of emotion. New Moon in the Evil Age is a magnificent and diverse album, rightfully heralding Janel and Anthony as visionaries who reach beyond the bounds of category.
https://www.janelandanthony.com/