Stephan Micus
Darkness and Light

A journey around the world: of sounds. It's the experience we have every time we listen to a work by Stephan Micus. In the opening of "Darkness and Light", released in 1990 for ECM, we are greeted by the dilruba, an Indian instrument with 4 strings plus 24 more that vibrate sympathetically; played with a bow, the instrument has a keyboard very similar to that of the sitar.

Here, there are seven dilrubas, overdubbed one on top of the other to form a small chamber orchestra that releases its archaic song; shortly after, the classical guitar enters for a solo composed of a couple of graceful and melancholic themes: a brief episode to which the dilruba adds, resuming its melodic meditation in dialogue with the guitar. Then the guitar alone again, finally the return of the dilrubas with the addition of 4 reed flutes: two kortholt (a German Renaissance instrument) and two suling (a kind of recorder borrowed from the Balinese gamelan).

The piece thus has an a-b-c-b-a structure, lasting half an hour. "Darkness and Light" is divided into 3 parts for a total of 53 minutes of music. In the second part, we listen for 10 minutes to the austere background of the dilrubas on which intertwine the solos of two ki un ki, an extraordinary wind instrument used by the Siberian Udegey tribe: made of a two-meter-long cane (see cover image), the instrument is played not with exhaled air but with inhaled air... Here Stephan Micus recalls the experiments of Jon Hassell, except for the fact that Micus' sounds are exclusively acoustic.

Third part: eight Ballast-strings (the sound sculpture conceived by the artist Paul Fuchs and the musician Dieter Trüstedt; they resemble the very long sound of a gong) and three dilrubas in the low register produce dark and nocturnal sonorities (darkness); after 4 minutes, the piercing tin whistle of the Irish folk tradition (light) breaks in, alternating solos with the dilruba, until towards the end of the piece, 13 minutes in duration, the two instruments play the same theme in unison.

Before listening to "Darkness and Light", we perhaps didn't even know about the existence of these instruments. But Stephan Micus, the ambassador of sounds, revealed them to us. Once again, we can only be grateful to him.