Stephan Micus

CD version. Thunder is the 25th solo album that Stephan Micus has made for ECM, released in January 2023 to coincide with his 70th birthday. As on all his records, the German composer plays every instrument and sings every voice himself. This time the sound is dominated by the dung chen, the Tibetan trumpet some four metres long. He had only recently learned it and uses it here for the first time. Its roar gave the album its name and its subject: nine pieces, each dedicated to a thunder god of a different culture.

Micus recorded the music alone at MCM Studios between 2020 and 2022, building each piece by overdubbing. Finding a teacher for the dung chen proved difficult. He eventually found monks at a monastery in Bodnath, the Buddhist centre of Kathmandu, who agreed to teach him an instrument usually reserved for monks. By their account he may be the first non-Tibetan to play it. The other instruments come from India, Burma, Borneo, Siberia, Japan, South America, Gambia, Namibia, Sweden and Bavaria. Among them are shakuhachi and nohkan flutes, sarangi, nyckelharpa, the sapeh lute of Borneo, bass zithers, storm drums and Burmese temple bells. He dedicates the album "to the big family of thundergods around the world", hoping that their destructive powers might be pacified.

In Tibetan ritual the dung chen holds a low drone of one or two notes. Micus makes it play agile, horn-like calls, and the dung chen pieces open, centre and close the album. A Song For Thor sets three of them over two frame drums, bells, ki un ki and bass zither. A Song For Vajrapani honours the thunder deity of Tibetan Buddhism, and A Song For Perun, for the Slavic god, uses four. Between them come lighter groupings. Storm drums, chimes and shakuhachi serve Raijin and Leigong, and three sarangi with nyckelharpa serve Armazi and Zeus. For Shango and Ishkur he builds choirs of his own voice over kaukas and sapeh.

The German magazine Jazzpodium noted that the dung chen brings in a force Micus had so far tended to avoid. Simon Broughton gave it four stars in Songlines in 2023. He heard the closing piece arc "into glorious fanfares pushing the instrument to crazy extremes like a golden light in the sky after the storm has passed". In Jazzwise, Jane Cornwell called the album "a work of epiphany inducing insight and swirling epic power".

This is the CD edition, ECM 2757, first released on 20 January 2023, with liner notes by Micus in the booklet.