Stephan Micus - Snow (2008)

"To me, snow is one of the most beautiful of all natural phenomena", says Stephan 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. The inspiration for his new album came largely from a long study tour through extremely isolated regions of Armenia, Nagorno-Karabakh and the mountains of the Caucasus.

As always, Micus had one object in mind: to learn new instrumental or vocal techniques from traditional masters. In 2006 he paid a long visit to Yerevan to study the duduk, an Armenian double-reed instrument of apricot wood. Snow presents it as the main musical protagonist, featuring it in unprecedented combinations with African, Asian, South and North American and European instruments, including an especially expressive duet, 'Midnight Sea', with the Bavarian zither. The human voice plays a leading role, sometimes magnified into a mighty choir. Over the last 12 years Micus has travelled four times to Georgia to study its traditional art of choral singing. It's also his first album to feature a South American instrument, with two solos on the charango, a plucked instrument from Peru resembling a ukulele.

Egypt, Armenia, Burma, China, Germany, Gambia, Mali, Peru, Tibet and USA: the list of countries where the instruments on Snow originated makes it clear that the unique, imaginary 'world music' that Micus has been playing for the last 35 years (he was born in 1953) is possible in this form only at the present moment: "Fifty years ago I couldn't travel as much as I do today and in another 50 years many of the instruments may no longer exist as many musical traditions are threatened with extinction."