Towards The Wind is the album on which Stephan Micus first recorded the duduk, the Armenian double-reed instrument carved from apricot wood. Released by ECM in 2002, it is an eight-part suite in which the duduk carries the main voice among kalimba, shakuhachi, West African talking drums and guitars. Micus plays everything himself, and as on his earlier records he takes each instrument out of its tradition and puts it to work in music of his own.
The starting point was a gift of CDs by the Armenian virtuoso Jivan Gasparian. Micus was struck by how many textures Gasparian drew from an instrument with a range of little more than an octave. He spent the whole of September 1999 in Yerevan, studying with Gasparian for several hours a day, and Gasparian helped him choose his instruments. Over thirty years Micus had tried many reeds, from the kortholt and crumhorn to the Korean p'iri. Yet he had released only one earlier reed piece, Till The End Of Time, recorded in 1978. The new album was made between 1999 and 2001 at MCM Studios, with Micus on duduk, bass duduk, kalimba, steel-string and 14-string guitars, shakuhachi, sattar, dondon and voice.
The opening Before Sunrise gives the melody to the bass duduk, which in Armenian practice only holds a drone of one or two notes beneath other players. Padre, a slow duduk solo, is dedicated to his father Eduard Micus, a painter who died in 2000. In the closing Crossing Dark Rivers, seven duduks and three shakuhachi gather around the 14-string guitar Micus designed in 1982. He told ECM that the Armenian and the Japanese instrument "seem to have similar souls", both so breathy that a single note can say a great deal. Flying Horses, for three steel-string guitars, shakuhachi and twelve dondon, marks his return to the steel-string guitar after several years.
The press reactions ECM collects for Micus describe his method more than any one record. Billboard wrote that he plays ethnic instruments "in nontraditional ways, multitracking them in layered arrangements and creating meditative excursions". Writing about this album on the ECM Reviews site in 2013, Tyran Grillo called it "one of his most astonishing creations, if only for the rudiments of its means". In Micus's account the duduk is not played alone in its homeland, where several instruments usually hold a drone under a soloist, so the solo pieces here are his own departure.
This is the CD edition, ECM 1804, first released on 13 May 2002, with liner notes by Micus.
