Stephan Micus
The Garden of Mirrors

Have you ever spent an entire day alone in a desert? I have, and here's the quick chronicle: at first, thousands of thoughts crowd your mind for the first 4/5 hours, ranging from phobias to rational responses, bouts of desperation, waves of positivity, and full-blown panic attacks. Then, as if by magic, your subconscious finds a line, a direction, right or wrong as it may be. The mind quiets, breath becomes solemn, movements slow down acquiring greater steadiness, the instinctive and animal part emerges, and suddenly answers arise from the depths in a harmonious, almost Zen-like unity; mystics talk about the 6th Chakra being in contact with the All.

Stephan Micus, eclectic multi-instrumentalist on his 12th album (!!), must have lost himself in a desert too, because the 9 tracks contained in this album seem to have been composed from the 5th hour onward, such is the serenity and harmonious sense that pervades the entire album. A profound and archaic record, dealing in a "light" and tangible way with the primitive and atavistic sounds of Man understood as a Human Being. Not by chance, the main protagonist of the project "The Garden of Mirrors" is the voices and the skillful and wise use of few, very few, mostly unknown instruments, that sound like sand crashing on a rock or the wind threading through the leaves of a solitary palm. A record played with traditional instruments mainly African, Japanese, Irish, Egyptian, or of semi-unknown origin, probably the very same used by the primitive tribes that inhabited the planet Earth thousands of years ago.
Describing the "songs" is an almost titanic task as it is probably useless since it is the entire project as conceived that transports us to a space-time dimension that is not, cannot be ours. We are close to the first civilizations of Homo Sapiens, we are facing sounds that probe slowly and deeply into the most hidden and secret parts of our guts, our past, the countless lives we have lived (for those who believe in reincarnation). There are tracks like "Earth" where the singing becomes a choral prayer, a kind of redemption or invocation of good omen, in a language unknown to us but no less dense with meaning for that. The following piece "Passing Cloud" with its slow pacing brings us to discover the sound of a wonderful wind instrument called "shakuhachi", a sort of bamboo cane, I imagine, with an evocative and poignant flavor. "Violeta" with its hypnotic and ritualistic rhythm with a beautiful vocal polyphony of three harmonies that integrate together giving the piece a mystical and transcendental veil.
But I stop here with the descriptions of the pieces, because just by rereading them I realize I am taking away the ultimate sense of the compositions and rendering only 5% of what these pieces truly communicate, which in my opinion are of an unbearable beauty. In some cases (or I would be tempted to add "in most cases") too many words are not needed; on the contrary, they worsen. It is Stephan Micus himself who, with this album, seems to want to "tell" us this, as there are no lyrics of the singing (or translations given the impossible language) inside, but, lo and behold, the description of the individual instruments: their history, their use over the years, as if the "real protagonists" were them and Stephan the "medium": as if the message were simply this, nothing more.

I would recommend it, just once, to die-hard metalheads, unrepentant goths, irreducible rockers, to those who dwell in their "Little Ancient World" unaware that there are Other Ways, Other Worlds, Other Possibilities (at any level they may be understood) that would be worth, perhaps for once, not to say "explore" but at least "sniff." For everyone else, 50 minutes of elevated spirituality in the form of music.