Stephan Micus

Snow is the eighteenth ECM album by the German multi-instrumentalist Stephan Micus, an eight-part suite in which he plays every instrument and sings every voice through multitrack recording. The Armenian duduk is its central voice, set beside a Bavarian zither, West African harps, Andean charangos and choirs of his own overdubbed voice. As on all his records, the instruments are taken out of their home traditions and given new music.

Micus, born in 1953, has travelled through Asia, South America and Africa since 1972 to learn instruments from their players. According to the ECM notes, this album grew from a long study tour through Armenia, Nagorno-Karabakh and the Caucasus. In autumn 2006 he returned to Yerevan to study the duduk, and he has also travelled to Georgia to study its choral singing. He worked on the music between 2005 and 2007 at MCM Studios, building each piece through successive recordings instead of a written score. The cover art is credited to Eduard Micus.

The title track sets the duduk against two doussn' gouni harps, gongs and Tibetan cymbals. In Midnight Sea the duduk plays a long, soulful line over the Bavarian zither alone. In the notes Micus links snow to his Bavarian home and to moonlit walks in the Alpine foothills. Nordic Light is an improvisation for solo charango, the small Andean guitar. For Ceren and Halil, the longest part at nearly eleven minutes, starts in the same way and gathers eight charangos, duduk, nay, sinding harp and five hammered dulcimers. The closing Brother Eagle gives the bass duduk, usually a drone instrument, broad melodic lines over two sindings and a choir of overdubbed voices.

In the German magazine Stereo, Berthold Klostermann noted that pairing the duduk with a Bavarian zither, a West African harp or Tibetan cymbals reads as a curiosity but sounds enchanting. Ulrich Steinmetzger in Jazzpodium heard a language of Micus's own that is universal and has grown organically. For Richard Robert of Les Inrockuptibles, working in total self-sufficiency, Micus creates "une forme de world-music unique au monde". Snow followed On the Wing of 2006 and returned to the duduk, which Micus had already explored on Towards the Wind in 2002.

This is the CD edition, ECM 2063, first released on 10 June 2008, in a jewel case with a 16-page booklet in an O-card.