My review of Stephan Micus' Nomad Songs, today at All About Jazz .
For his 21st ECM recording (his first six originally released on the label's sister imprint Japo but subsequently reissued on ECM), multi-instrumentalist and intrepid musical explorer Stephan Micus simplifies...well, relatively speaking...to the sparer instrumental settings of earlier recordings like The Music of Stones (1989), East of the Night (1985) and Till the End of Time (1978). That's not to say that Micus--who's recorded all his music in his own MCM Studio since 1992's To the Evening Child--has deserted his usual modus operandi: creating largely multi-tracked pieces that may begin with the smallest kernel of an idea but ultimately become near-orchestral yet meditative, reflecting a lifetime of travel to faraway cultures, studying and incorporating what is now a massive array of indigenous instruments into hitherto unheard of combinations.
Unlike his last recording, Panagia (2013)--or, for that matter, previous ones such as 2010's Bold as Light and 2007's On the Wing--Nomad Songs works, however, with a much smaller instrumental palette. Songs that regularly layer instruments like six shakuhachi, seventeen voices or eight charangos are nowhere to be found; instead, the eleven tracks that make up Nomad Songs are surprisingly spare, with no more than six instruments found on just one track: the slow-paced "The Dance," which features twelve-string guitar; one long-necked lute from West China; one Afghan lute; two steel-string guitars and the genbri, a three-stringed bass lute.
Elsewhere, Micus' songs are as spacious as "The Blessing," which features but a single voice, singing a plaintive melody that feels somehow rooted in the middle east, or "Sea of Grass," where two tin whistles are played simultaneously to create a harmonious theme that feels, as is true of so much of Micus' music, less culled from any single culture and, instead, drawn from around the globe into a single, unified language that exemplifies the concept of music as a universal language--one that knows no borders and erects no boundaries. Similarly, "The Stars" is a rubato piece for solo twelve-string guitar that moves from simple lines to lush chordal constructs, all with the kind of calming quietude redolent of Micus' ability to create music that is sometimes less song and more atmosphere.
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Originally Posted by soundsweird
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