Winter's End is the 24th solo album by Stephan Micus for ECM, released in June 2021. As usual, the German multi-instrumentalist plays everything himself, combining instruments from distant traditions that had never been heard side by side. No other musicians take part. Here the centre of gravity is the chikulo, a large bass xylophone from Mozambique that enters his music for the first time.
Micus recorded the twelve pieces alone between 2018 and 2020 at MCM Studios, building each one from overdubbed parts. ECM counts two instruments new to his work, the chikulo and a Central African-style tongue drum. Writing in Songlines, Simon Broughton counted eleven instruments from ten countries. He also explained that the chikulo is the bass of the timbila xylophone orchestras of the Chopi people, and is rarely played today because it is so big and hard to transport. Around it Micus places the tongue drum, kalimba, the Gambian sinding harp, Egyptian nay, Japanese nohkan and Balinese suling flutes, the bowed sattar from Xinjiang, Tibetan cymbals, charango, a 12-string guitar and his own voice.
The album is framed by two hymns. Autumn Hymn sets three chikulo, each with a different buzzing, wooden sound, against the high, breathy line of the nohkan. Winter Hymn returns to the same pairing at the end with Tibetan cymbals added. On The Longing of the Migrant Birds Micus multitracks his voice into a choir of between eleven and fourteen parts over tongue drums and chikulo. Walking in Snow is a solo for a slightly detuned 12-string guitar. Several reviewers linked the title to a short Japanese poem printed with the album, about a child who walks in the snow instead of on the cleared road.
Josef Woodard in DownBeat called it hypnotically contemplative and wrote that "this music feels at once familiar and foreign, in the best way." In Jazzwise, Robert Shore heard "a highly individual journey across the musical world, full of passionate instrumental encounters," and BBC Music Magazine gave the album five stars. Broughton observed that Micus takes instruments out of their original settings and places them beside unfamiliar neighbours. Roger Thomas, in the BBC review, placed him in an older idea of world music as a search for a shared global language, in which mixing cultures was seen as desirable.
This is the CD edition, ECM 2698, first released in 2021.
