Zen is a solo koto record by Michael Vetter, made as a live studio concert on 24 March 1985 with no corrective edits and no playback techniques. Three long improvisations, Wo? Hier!, Darum?! and Jetzt ... Du:, grouped under the heading Erinnerungen in die Gegenwart (Memories into the Present), unfold on the thirteen strings of the Japanese floor harp.

Vetter, born in Oberstdorf on 18 September 1943 and died in Munich on 7 December 2013, was a German musician, painter, writer and composer. He first became known in the late 1950s for renewing recorder technique, experimenting with timbres, multiphonics and microtones, and published a book of nearly 2,000 fingerings in 1969. His work led composers such as Louis Andriessen, Sylvano Bussotti and Mauricio Kagel to write for the instrument. He was known later for overtone singing and vocal improvisation. With Karlheinz Stockhausen he gave the first performance of the complete version of Spiral in 1996, two and a half hours long, and Stockhausen wrote a leading role for him in Mittwoch aus Licht. The concert was recorded at the Tonstudio van Geest in Heidelberg/Sandhausen by Teije Van Geest, who also edited it. Vetter painted the cover and wrote the notes.

In his words the thirteen strings, tuned to a minor pentatonic scale, sit beneath his hands like a mantra. His playing is more varied than a constantly repeated formula, and more inventive in technique, so that an underlying calm vibrates through many-layered structures. The pieces are long: twelve minutes for the first, eleven for the second, and almost 25 for Jetzt ... Du:.

The Japanese instrument and the title have a background in his life. Vetter spent thirteen years largely as a Zen monk in Japan, where he completed his book shijima no oto (The Sound of Silence), an approach joining the artistic avant-garde and Zen meditation. In 1982 he received the Japanese Art Prize of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs for the experimental calligraphy of his Book of Signs. Two years after this concert, in September 1987, he recorded his overtone Gesänge der Nacht in the abbey of Le Thoronet, released by the same label in its series Overtones in Old European Cathedrals.

CD, Wergo Spectrum SM 1052-2, first released in 1986 and reissued on CD in 1990.