RONIN Rhythm

Asked about the meaning of words, Igor Stravinsky replied: “Sometimes I feel like those old men Gulliver encounters in the Voyage to Laputa, who have renounced language and who try to converse by means of objects themselves. A composer is always in that position: he has no verbal control over his music... The one true comment on a piece of music is another piece of music.”

The painting “Appetenz”, by Berlin artist Armin Staudt, depicts a primeval animal, muzzle to the ground, in a geometric space of black on black. “A composer improvises aimlessly the way an animal grubs about,” says Stravinsky. The animal in the picture looks so alive, archaic and wondrous precisely because of its clearly composed surroundings. Depending on the direction of the light, the colours slumbering beneath the surface of the painting break into seismic song. The pictorial composition outwits itself.

A band should mature into an integral organism – then it is alive, like an animal, a biotope, an urban space. It creates overtone blossoms, ghost notes, spectral sounds, flights of perspective.
The rule of the Japanese martial arts is: think with your body. Anaxagoras tells us: man is the wisest of animals because he has hands. As the animal in “Appetenz” sniffs the ground because it has a nose, so RONIN play music because of the pleasure they take in the tactile, in the percussive construction of cities, in reasoning by resonating. They think with their ears and hands. Their pieces are spaces to be entered and inhabited.

Nik Bärtsch
Zurich, October 2005