To The Evening Child is a solo album by Stephan Micus, recorded in early 1992 and released by ECM the same year. As always he plays and sings everything himself, here bringing together instruments that would never meet in their places of origin. The steel drum of Caribbean calypso sits beside the Hindustani dilruba, the Balinese suling and the Middle Eastern nay. The West African sinding harp and the kortholt, a Renaissance reed instrument, complete the set. The seven parts form one of his most gentle and song-like cycles.
The album was made at MCM Studios in January and February 1992. Discogs credits all music and voices to Micus as composer and performer, and the record carries ECM's usual line "An ECM Production". His method is the one ECM describes on its page: he takes instruments out of their cultural, historical and traditional contexts and blends them in new ways. Over many albums he has learned to play rare traditional instruments, then used them in his own tunings and combinations. The singing is wordless or in a language of his own invention, as Tyran Grillo noted in his writing on the album.
The steel drums run through the whole record, and Grillo hears them as a resonant undercurrent close to the sound of a gamelan. Nomad Song, the opening part, puts Micus's own voice at the centre. In Yuko's Eyes he sings over the bowed dilruba, while Young Moon joins steel drum, suling and kortholt with open-throated vocal calls. The title piece, the longest on the album at over nine minutes, belongs to the nay, which Grillo ties to the album's moonlit, watery imagery. Morgenstern is a short interlude of two minutes before the slow procession of Equinox.
Grillo, reviewing the album on his site ECM Reviews, called it "a lullaby" and read its meditations as paternal in feeling. In his book Between Sound and Space, quoted by ECM, he wrote that this music "sounds in those hushed spaces where the universe inhales". ECM's press file on Micus also cites Down Beat, which described his work as "remarkable, haunting and truly timeless".
This CD is the 2019 reissue in ECM's Touchstones series, which brings catalogue albums back into print in card packaging. To The Evening Child was first released in 1992 as ECM 1486.
