Ocean is a four-part solo work by the German multi-instrumentalist Stephan Micus, and his first album on the ECM label after a run of records for its sister imprint JAPO. Micus plays every instrument himself, layering voice, hammered dulcimers, Japanese sho and shakuhachi, the end-blown nay flute and Bavarian zithers into long, slowly unfolding pieces. The result points toward the transcultural music his ECM biography describes as his aim.
Born in 1953, Micus has travelled widely in Asia, Africa, Europe and the Americas, and learned the sho and the shakuhachi in Kyoto. He does not try to play such instruments in a traditional manner. He looks instead for the fresh possibilities he hears in them, often combining instruments never before played together. Ocean was recorded digitally in January 1986 at Tonstudio Bauer in Ludwigsburg, with Martin Wieland as engineer. The cover photograph is by Anselm Spring.
Each part names its forces in its title. Part I opens with a wordless vocal incantation, then six hammered dulcimers set up a shimmering pulse and the nay takes over from the voice. Part II, nearly twenty minutes long, starts from the sustained chords of four sho, out of which a shakuhachi line rises before three zithers and two dulcimers add fluttering, skittering figures. Part III is built on silences and cascades of dulcimer notes with the shakuhachi drifting across them. The album closes with Part IV, a little over seven minutes for solo sho. The whole record runs about fifty minutes.
Writing for ECM Reviews in 2012, Tyran Grillo argued that Micus had "absorbed rather than pilfered a wealth of musical traditions". He heard in the sho of Part II "every step forward an exhalation, every step backward an inhalation". The Italian critic Piero Scaruffi called Ocean Micus's definitive symphony of timbres, perhaps the most perfect blend of instrumental colours in his work. Micus has stayed with ECM ever since, up to To the Rising Moon in 2024.
This CD belongs to ECM's Touchstones series, which brings key albums from the label's back catalogue back into print in card sleeves. ECM 1318, first released in 1986, this edition 2023.
