Desert Poems is the fifteenth solo album by the German composer and multi-instrumentalist Stephan Micus, released by ECM in January 2001. As the credits state, Micus performs all the music and all the voices himself, building many pieces from overdubbed layers of a single instrument. The common thread is the desert. Micus told ECM that its austerity and simplicity are what he cherishes in the deserts he has crossed on foot or by camel, the Sinai, Gobi, Sahara and Takla Makan among them.
He recorded the album between 1997 and 2000 at his MCM Studios on Mallorca. It marks his first recordings on three African instruments: the doussn' gouni, a West African harp, the kalimba, a Tanzanian thumb piano, and the dondon, a talking drum from Ghana. The Indian sarangi returns after several years, rebuilt with a new bridge for ten gut strings and plucked percussively. Around these he uses the dilruba, the nay, the Uighur sattar, the shakuhachi, steel drums, the sinding harp and tuned clay flowerpots. The liner essay is by Mitchell Feldman.
Contessa Entellina is his first unaccompanied vocal piece on record, sung in English. It grew from a village he passed on a scooter in the Sicilian heat after a 1997 concert in Palermo, and it borrows from several vocal styles, Japanese Noh among them. Shen Khar Venakhi, a Georgian polyphonic chant from the thirteenth century written for three-part male choir, is arranged here for six dilruba and six sattar. It is the first piece by another hand in his discography. Adela, played on 22 overdubbed dilruba, sounds closer to Western chamber music, while For Yuko, dedicated to his daughter, sets eight voices against flowerpots and shakuhachi.
Micus himself noted that the album may seem less homogeneous than some of his earlier ones. The Garden of Mirrors had centred on African harps and vocal choirs, and To the Evening Child on steel drums. Here the moods move between the meditative, the melancholy and the ecstatic. Reviewing the album for ECM Reviews in 2013, Tyran Grillo heard the doussn' gouni solo Night as a reflection that "bears gifts from the heavens to the caverns". His verdict fits in three words: "A selfless masterpiece."
This is the CD edition, catalogue number ECM 1757, with nine tracks and a booklet including Feldman's essay. It was first released on 22 January 2001.
