Stephan Micus Releases TRACES IN THE SAND Album via ECM

Stephan Micus has released Traces in the Sand, his 27th solo album for ECM, available November 13, 2026. The album features a dozen instruments from Borneo, Japan, India, Armenia, Ethiopia, Tanzania, Mozambique, Botswana, Morocco, Ireland, Switzerland and Bavaria.

'I go almost every day to the beach and swim, throughout the year. Working on my music - often three months on a four-minute piece - needs a lot of concentration. To focus totally on a composition necessarily narrows down your perception. So when I go to the sea and see this wide expanse of water and a big horizon it is like an incredible medicine. Wide spaces have always fascinated me, and I try to incorporate them in my music. In this context the sea has been an invaluable teacher,' Micus said.

Stephan Micus, born in Bavaria but resident in Mallorca for over 30 years, composes music for instruments he's collected from all over the world. This album features a dozen instruments from Borneo, Japan, India, Armenia, Ethiopia, Tanzania, Mozambique, Botswana, Morocco, Ireland, Switzerland and Bavaria. Celebrating the richness of the sea, it's his 27th solo album for ECM.

Traces in the Sand opens with rhythmic flourishes on the steelpan-like hang and African kalimbas (thumb pianos) - almost like waves on a beach. These percussion instruments create a vigorous background for the two melodic instruments, Japanese shakuhachi and Armenian duduk. The shakuhachi is higher pitched than the duduk, but both have a characteristic breathy tone. Their melodies intertwine over the continuously shifting background - which occasionally becomes a foreground.

Many of the pieces on this album feature instruments which begin in a dialogue and then finally come together at the end. That's true also of the Indian cane flutes of 'Dancing Cranes' played over an accompaniment of a kalimba from Mozambique. Actually it's one cane flute overdubbed, but the first one played in a lower octave than the second. Their melodies alternate at first but after four turns they start playing simultaneously.

The technical name for the kalimba is a lamellophone, which comprises metal tongues attached to a resonator. They are known by different names in various parts of sub-Saharan Africa - mbira, kalimba, sanza, and so on. On this album Micus uses kalimbas he has collected in Ethiopia, Tanzania, Mozambique and Botswana.

The titles of some of the tracks reflect this notion of two characters or instruments meeting, for instance 'The Pearl Diver and the Mermaid' in which a plucked sapeh duets with the reedy duduk. The sapeh is a beautiful lute from Borneo, with five metal strings, carved from a single piece of wood.

'Another Day at Sea' and 'Brother Dolphin' are related tracks using the same simple combination of kalimba with the gentle addition of Irish bodhran drum and plucked Moroccan genbri, but these are just softly adding a touch of bass. The kalimba seems to evoke the flashes of light glittering on the surface of the sea.

Micus has always been influenced by the natural world and his music has been inspired by deserts, forests, thunder and more. Traces in the Sand doesn't attempt to depict the sea, but reflects on the feelings its continually changing state evokes.

'For Layla and Majnun' is another piece that brings two characters together, this time the ill-fated lovers of Middle Eastern legend. Here the two characters are represented by the highly contrasted sounds of plucked sapeh and bowed dilruba with its strong and vigorous tone. The duduk solo that follows is like a moment of reflection, a kind of meditation. The duduk usually has a melancholy tone, but that's only partly true here and the way Micus plays it sounds nothing like the way it's played in Armenia.

'Actually I try to do something different with all my instruments,' says Micus. 'To play the duduk as the Armenians do, doesn't make any sense for a German. Automatically my duduk playing is different because I have this background of other wind instruments - like shakuhachi and ney. It's not so much a conscious effort, it's just the way it comes out from me.'

A new sound emerges in 'Light on Water', the Japanese sho, a free reed mouth-organ with 17 pipes. The combination of instruments here - three sho, three bowed dilruba and two duduk creates an extraordinary sound. And, as with most of Micus' tracks, a combination that hasn't been heard before.

The closing piece, 'Far Horizon' seems to offer a more distant perspective with alternating solos on plucked sapeh and the reedy duduk. With his cast of 12 instrumental characters, Micus brings us an endlessly changing and surprising vision of the ocean and in a way that only he could do it.

The Garden of Mirrors Vinyl Reissue

ECM is also releasing Stephan Micus' 1997 recording The Garden of Mirrors on vinyl for the first time, also on November 13, 2026.

The Garden Of Mirrors, Micus's fourteenth album, can today be considered a pillar in the German multi-instrumentalist's wide-reaching oeuvre – one which Down Beat called 'remarkable, haunting and truly timeless' upon its original release on ECM in 1997.

Micus has built a musical identity based on the concept of never repeating himself twice, nor employing the same array of instruments on different albums. On The Garden Of Mirrors, his ever-expanding pool of instruments, often collected during travels around the world, is reduced to two traditional African harps, the bolombatto (gut strings) and sinding (hemp strings), which Micus first encountered in Gambia, where he studied them with the help of local musicians.

However, he's keen to point out that the compositions on the album are not African music, though 'to a certain extent the harps create this sort of African ambience, conveying the essence of their culture. They give the music a physical quality. They speak directly to the body, making this one of my most rhythmic albums.'

'My music reflects the contemporary world,' he claims, 'where one can travel easily and experience different cultures, or just go into a store and find examples of all these different musics.'

Micus' use of traditional instruments expresses some of the many possibilities which exist for interaction between various cultures. Here, they create a striking programme that has its own unique signature.