A fascinating solo album from the Swiss pianist, composer and conceptualist best known as leader of the bands Ronin and Mobile, Entendre offers deeper insight into Nik Bärtch’s musical thinking. As the album title implies Entendre is about hearing as a creative process, referencing the patient unfolding of Bärtch’s modular polymetric pieces, with alertness to the dynamics of touch, finding freedom in aesthetic restriction, serving the flow of each piece’s development while also taking the music to new places.  Recorded at Auditorio Stelio Molo RSI, Lugano, in September 2020, and produced by Manfred Eicher.

Bärtsch delivers his first solo record for ECM, revisiting ‘Module’ (in English, modules), as he calls his pieces, recorded with his two groups, Ronin or the more acoustically inclined Mobile. The results inevitably veer closer to zen than funk. ‘Modul 58’, for example, shimmers in a sparse beauty […] It offers a chance to peer under the bonnet of a Bärtsch composition stripped of the sonic distractions of an ensemble. Bärtsch describes his ‘Module’ as templates that can be developed towards different ends […] an interesting left turn.
John Bungey, London Jazz News