German multi-instrumentalist Stephan Micus was making his own rather idiosyncratic version of world music years before it became fashionable to do so. Micus specializes in taking ethnic instruments from all over the planet and using them, in ways that transcend their traditional contexts, to play his own moody and somewhat austere compositions. On Darkness and Light Micus makes extensive use of the dilruba, a four-stringed bowed Indian instrument that sounds somewhat like a nasal cello which has 24 sympathetic strings that set up a hypnotic drone effect behind the haunting melodies. Also featured are the classical Spanish guitar, the Balinese suling flute, an Irish tin whistle, the sho (a Japanese bamboo mouth-organ), the kortholt (a German renaissance reed instrument), various gongs, and the remarkable ki un ki, a six-foot-long Siberian cane trumpet (pictured on the cover)…

On this recording, from 1985, multi-instrumentalist Stephan Micus takes his listeners on a journey guided mainly by his incredible playing on a guitar that he disgned, custom-built by master luthier Manuel Diaz of Granada, Spain. It is a unique instrument that allows the player to customize the string array to suit his mood and the piece to be performed.
On this outing, Micus fits it with 10 single-course strings for the first half of the album, the title track 'East of the night'. He accompanies his guitar on this piece with two groups of shakuhaci (the Japanese bamboo flute used by Zen monks in meditation), a pair and a group of four. The effect is simply beautiful - the guitar is used as a base for the gentle, soaring melodies carried by the shakuhachi, making the piece a transporting tribute to the dawn (as another reviewer astutely related the title)…

Stephan Micus is an extraordinary musical traveller, exploring the world, collecting instruments and then creating his own musical worlds from them. This is his 23rd album for ECM and on each one he composes the tracks, plays and overdubs them to create unique and exquisite pieces of chamber music. The ten tracks on ‘White Night’ particularly rely on the sound of various sub-Saharan kalimba (thumb pianos) and the oboe-like Armenian duduk. There are two purely solo tracks, ‘All the Way’ on a kalimba from Botswana and ‘The Moon’ on Armenian duduk, while ‘Fireflies’ has 22 overdubs of Indian whistles, Micus’s voice and other instruments. “I dedicate this album to the moon which has always been a source of magic in many cultures,” says Micus. “Music too is a source of magic which is where the two connect.” Aside from his 14 string guitar, Micus plays instruments from Armenia, Tibet, India, Egypt, Ghana, Senegal, Tanzania, Botswana, Namibia and Ethiopia, most of them in combinations never heard before.

Stephan Micus is a one-man universe of sound. He collects and studies instruments from around the world and creates his own musical journeys with them. This is his 24th solo album for ECM created in his studio with many recordings and overdubs. The twelve tracks on Winter’s End feature two new instruments, the chikulo from Mozambique and a Central African-style tongue drum. In addition there’s kalimba (thumb piano), sinding (Gambian harp), Egyptian nay flute, Japanese nohkan flute, Balinese suling flute, bowed sattar from Xinjiang, Tibetan cymbals, Peruvian charango and a 12-string guitar. Most of these have never sounded together before.

“Panagia” is Stephan Micus’ 20th album for ECM, and it coincides with his 60th birthday in January 2013. The Greek word Panagia is one of the names of the Virgin Mary, Mother of Christ. Stephan Micus’ album takes six Byzantine Greek prayers and sets them in his own inimitable way with instruments he has collected in years of travels round the world. “The album alternates sung poems with instrumental tracks and thus has a clearly symmetrical, even ritualistic, structure”, says Micus.

Being a perpetual student, Stephan Micus usually makes world music by default. He breathes patience and skill into the exotic instruments he uncovers, but certainly with respectful bending of the rules along the way. Towards the Wind follows in the same exploratory tradition – educated, but unassuming as to the nature of what an instrument is "supposed to do." Here, the album evokes an easily digestible cross section of Middle Eastern mysticism – swirling sand dunes, rust-colored sunsets, and sacred spaces.

'Snow' is the title Stephan Micus has given to his 18th album for ECM. It is the outcome of continuous work he has carried out on journeys and in the studio since the release of his 'On the Wing' in early spring 2006. 'To me, snow is one of the most beautiful of all natural phenomena', explains Micus, who has been living in Spain for many years. 'It’s closely associated with lasting impressions of my original home in Bavaria, especially the long moonlit walks I used to take when I lived in the Alpine foothills. I've always regarded snow as the essence of magic, even more so today now that there's so little of it and the glaciers are disappearing.' Micus's music has always drawn on impressions of nature and the countryside.