Inland Sea is the 22nd solo album for ECM by Stephan Micus. For decades he has travelled, collected and studied instruments from around the world, writing new music for them. Here the lead role goes to the nyckelharpa, the Swedish keyed fiddle, which he had never used on record before. He sets it beside instruments from Central Asia, Japan and North Africa that would rarely meet, and plays none of them in a traditional manner.
Micus composed and performed everything himself, building the pieces through overdubs at MCM Studios between 2014 and 2016. He holds the nyckelharpa upright like a cello and uses a longer bow than usual. Beside it he plays the balanzikom, a lute from the Wakhan valley on the border of Tajikistan and Afghanistan. This too is new to his music. The Japanese shakuhachi, which he began learning in the 1970s, returns with the Moroccan genbri, a steel-string guitar and two zithers of his own design, one with bass strings 1.7 metres long. He also sings, in a language of his own invention.
The record contains no percussion instruments. The percussive sounds come from the wooden keys of the nyckelharpa, which on Dancing Clouds and Nuria clatter in layers under flowing melodic lines. Haze opens the album as a duet of balanzikom and nyckelharpa, while Dawn and Dusk frame it with three and two overdubbed nyckelharpas. At the centre stands Virgen de la Mar, a hymn-like chant for sixteen voices over three genbris, informed by the polyphonic singing Micus studied in Georgia and Bulgaria.
Writing for Gramophone, Fiona Talkington described the nyckelharpa as "a European companion to his many Asian bowed instruments" and found the whole "reflective and intriguing". Brian Marley of London Jazz News (2017) heard music that exists "in a timeless nowhereland that's nonetheless strangely familiar", though he found the multi-voiced Virgen de la Mar a little too tidy. In the Swiss Tages-Anzeiger, Christoph Merki noted how light and shimmering the acoustic strings sound, always with a touch of melancholy.
This is the CD edition, ECM 2569, first released on 16 June 2017.
