Bold as Light is the nineteenth ECM album by the German multi-instrumentalist Stephan Micus, a solo record in ten parts built from instruments of Laos, Japan, Bavaria, Tanzania and The Gambia. Its three main voices are the Laotian raj nplaim, the Japanese nohkan flute and a choir of male voices, all sung by Micus himself. As always with him, the traditions are a starting point, and the music belongs to no single one of them.
Born in 1953, Micus learned many of his instruments from local masters on long journeys, then plays them in ways of his own. "To come up with a piece of music, I have to make the sound myself, have the instruments in my hands," he says in the words ECM prints with the album. He recorded the album alone at MCM Studios between 2007 and 2010, playing each line separately into a multi-track recorder. For this record he also designed two new instruments, a chord zither and a bass zither, and combined them with the nohkan, normally heard solo or with drums and voices. The booklet carries a short text by Leo Tolstoy.
The raj nplaim is a horizontally held bamboo pipe of the Hmong people with a free metal reed. Among the Hmong it is always a solo instrument, so Micus layers four, six or eight of them, which gives a sound close to a harmonium but able to slide between pitches. Rain and Wide River use these massed pipes alone. In Flying Swans seventeen voices, shaped by the polyphonic singing of Georgia and Bulgaria, move over the Japanese sho mouth organ. Seven Roses closes the album with nineteen voices, sho and raj nplaim, joining timbres that turn out to have much in common.
John Kelman wrote in All About Jazz that with Micus "the borders are entirely dissolved", and warned that calling the music new age "only diminishes the deeper meaning of his music". Michael Church was brief in the Independent on Sunday: "Seldom have plucked and blown instruments been put to such magical use." Patrick Labesse in Le Monde heard landscapes of an intriguing calm, where the notes allow themselves the privilege of slowness.
This is the CD edition, ECM 2173, first released in October 2010.
