Stephan Micus

Athos is Stephan Micus's musical account of a stay on Mount Athos, the monastic peninsula in northern Greece. It was released by ECM in 1994 with the subtitle A Journey to the Holy Mountain. The music turns that experience into a cycle of three days and three nights, framed by a departure and a return. Micus plays and sings every part himself, on instruments gathered from Asia, the Middle East and his native Bavaria.

Micus had been recording for ECM since Implosions in 1977, after years of study abroad. These included three years of sitar in Varanasi and a stay in Japan to learn shakuhachi. According to Simon Broughton in Songlines, the album goes back to a visit he made around 1990 to a monk who knew his music. On Athos, Broughton notes, visitors usually spend each night in a monastery and walk on to the next one by day. Micus then recorded the album at MCM Studios between November 1993 and February 1994.

On The Way opens the cycle with cascading Bavarian zither over the sattar, a bowed long-necked instrument of the Uyghurs. On The Way Back closes it with zither and sattar again, now joined by eleven voices. In between, nights and days alternate. The three night pieces are purely vocal, built from Micus's own voice multi-tracked 22 times, in keeping with the unaccompanied Orthodox evening services. Each day has its own wind instrument from a different tradition. The First Day is a solo for the Japanese shakuhachi, and The Third Day a solo for the Middle Eastern ney. In The Second Day the Balinese suling floats over a set of 22 flowerpots played as percussion.

Broughton describes this symmetrical layout as typical of the albums Micus made from then on. In a 2012 essay for the ECM Reviews site, Tyran Grillo warned that listeners expecting Byzantine chant would not find it here. As he put it, "the Micus experience has never been about total re-creation". He called the record "the diary of a sacred space".

This is the CD edition, ECM 1551, first released in October 1994.