CD ECM Records Stephan Micus: Towards The Wind

2002

Stephan Micus - Bass Duduk, Kalimba, Steel-String Guitar, Shakuhachi, Dondon, Duduk, Sattar, 14-String Guitar, Voice

“Towards The Wind”, the 15th ECM recording by the perennially popular world-traveller and multi-instrumentalist, features his debut performances on the Armenian duduk, that exceptionally expressive forerunner of the oboe and the clarinet. Stephan Micus was inspired by recordings of the great duduk virtuoso Jivan Gasparian and was able to study with Armenia’s greatest folk musician in Yerevan in the autumn of 1999. Gasparian passed along to him some of the instrument’s secrets, the ways in which its wealth of textures and sounds can be annexed.

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It’s impossible to categorise what Stephan Micus does, but for the last 30 years he’s ploughed a fascinating furrow. The steel-string guitar he celebrated on his 1983 album Listen to the Rain is only one of dozens of instruments he has mastered, ranging form the Algerian bagpipes to the Japanese shakuhachi, from the Hungarian taragot to the Indian shenai. A few years ago he became smitten with the Armenian duduk, and managed to persuade Djivan Gasparyan, the instrument’s most famous player, to give him a month’s intensive training. This CD, with its pervasively meditative mood, is the result.
Michael Church, Songlines

Multi-instrumentalist Stephan Micus produces pleasantly athereal, atmospheric music. It’s beautifully produced and performed and, if it demands little of the listener, it’s still an intelligent fusion of different world styles.
Duncan Heining, Jazzwise

Renowned for his experimentation with ethnic instruments played out of their normal cultural context, Bavarian composer Stephan Micus offers a meditative exploration of the duduk, an Armenian reed instrument, on Towards the Wind. This instrument, with its unique breathy quality, is traditionally used for drone effect and counterpoint. In Micus’ hands, it becomes the lead, portraying a desolate, mournful melody on the album-opening “Before Sunrise”. As a composer and performer, Micus is a minimalist, crafting pieces wherein silence and space are as critical as tone. This song cycle is no exception, as Micus sets up his key instruments – the duduk, the kalimba and the Japaneses bamboo flute shakuhachi – for an evocative meeting of tone and purpose. … In combining these instruments, Micus uncovers new tones and sources of harmony that resonate in mystical fashion. The results run the gamut from mournful to ebullient but are consistently absorbing.
Hilarie Grey, JazzTimes

Stephan Micus is an inveterate collector of traditional musical instruments and he has cast his eye about for a new addition to his stable. The result has been his acquisition of the Armenian double-reed woodwind called the duduk. When Micus takes on a new instrument he aims to add another perspective to his persona. Not only is he looking to consume what the instrument has to offer him in terms of technique and sound but, more interestingly, what he can offer to the instrument and its tradition. It is a living, breathing cross fertilisation of ideas and Micus, as a true world citizen has the great gift of making tradition relevant no matter what cultural territory he happens to place himself in. It is a measure of his sheer musicality that he can bring all these disparate elements together and meld them into a singularly recognisable and characteristic whole. … Stephan Micus’ music is the crystallisation of dramatic understatement and the ability to maximise effect from core abstraction. His questing nature thrusts him ever forward into new musical encounters with some of the worlds oldest known instruments, creating a coherent future from a dissipating past.
John Cratchley, Avant