Who is Stephan Micus, and is He like Us?

I'm not even sure that I can ask the question. I mean, you could start here, with his bio, from the ECM records site, which is quite nicely written and dainty and which gives a clarified butter-sense of his lost, wandering-journey-world-rover-spirit, his singular vision(ary), his smiling-beggar-exile, his smiling man. And good ol' west(ern) Wikipedia lets you briefly linger over him and know that he is, eternally, "new age". And this, here, is a great discography. I'm being quite informative sure, thank you, you're welcome, but you know nothing more except a few static pages. And you have heard nothing. Let's start with hearing, then.

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There, you could keep looping this stuff endlessly. Which is kind of what Stephan Micus does, except for that he loops nothing, he makes everything, and everything he makes he makes anew with the deep intent to make everything anew. Now, intent, as we all know -- or all ought to know, at this late point in the very early history of the world we do know -- is tricky to assume and even more conniving to dodge. We can assume nothing of it, and less than nothing from it, but we also cannot not know it as it comes towards us. And what Stephan Micus comes towards us with -- and he is coming towards an "us", totally solitary, not necessarily alone, as his recordings are layered affairs where nothing is alone and everything is the work of the solo traveler who arrives in solitude to express the fate of the world he comes upon to express the fate of that same very world he carries within him -- is something that can never be found, regardless of the clearwater wholesome and shining window effort of s/he who searches for the truth that lies behind all things, in that musical space named "new age" (which I will champion, despite the furious fists of rebellious freedom reigning down on us all, because, simply, I, too, need to relax my shoulders and meditate on an emptied river) -- Stephan Micus is, um, sincere about what he does, he means it, meaning that he means the it that it is and can forever be once it has been stated as being, and will always be, it.

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Right. As though what I wrote was to be understood. And yet, of course it was, because if not-understanding was the point, I would shriek to the heavens and tear my eyes out, I would exile myself to the darkness that is the darkest hour of man. I would lament in a language that no man would understand, which would mean my lament would be the lament of a man without any other man, a man with no other but himself beneath the sun that burns him, the night that abandons him, the mountain whose avalanche traps him, the bloodline whose ancestry he escapes. I mean that he spaces himself out, he is only always a distance from everything, from this thing, from things, from this.

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With Stephan Micus, though, something is very unique, almost too much so, and its uniqueness lies both within and without the music. First off, he's a craftsman in the purest sense, in the ancient sense, because he learns how to play the instruments that are out there, the cosmos of the world is the locality of his touch. He learns them, he is the teacher and the taught, the chanter and the enchanted. You almost start to dream, yourself, of going anywhere, everywhere (Steve Tibbetts' "Going Somewhere" comes to mind here), becoming anything, fantasizing that the distant mountain is your home, the eternal village of strangers is your people. But, furthermore, and yet, simultaneously, there is something inside the sounds that is bursting out, but almost beneath the music, too, a whisper beneath the whisper, a shadow of a shadow, an expression that is of the face and beyond the face, the symbol of a fading face on an ancient stone. It's hard, because all description of Stephan Micus' music seems to lead to the top of a mountain with a bearded white figure in a mysterious cloak on bended knee, the heavens all around him, the earth always eternally below. It's hard, because this description is what the music is and is everything the music avoids and becomes all that there is of the world that is all there is of a lone figure with a pile of instruments beside him, testing each in the empty air, bringing his breath and his hands and his fingers and his chest to bear upon strings, upon reeds, upon skin and earth and bone. The body of music is the body of all humanity.

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1994's "Athos - A Journey to the Holy Mountain" -- which is just that, a pilgrimage to the Greek Island home to 20 monasteries, a land only accessible by sea -- and 1986's "The Music of Stones" -- which is just that, a series composed around a series of large resonating stone blocks that sound, when struck, like the resonance at the bottom of a bottomless well -- each reveal the larger structure at work in Micus' world of music, music that is of a world that is ours and that is of a world that we could have only forgotten. Every thing is ancient, from a limit that lies outside time, that lies only at the very end and the very beginning of time. There are scrolls with words on which we write more words, there is the air that is ours, that is air we breathe, the air in which sages declare their silence and breathe out that same silence, the air in which the sounds of stones resonate around us and rumble beneath us.

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It's fitting to end with a tai chi performance -- and Micus is nowhere to be seen here, only slightly heard, with nothing but air around and inside him -- to the distant stones that encapsulate the resounding air, although there are no stones in this sound, because they have vanished, they are finished, their smooth surface is outside of us and what we touch with the movement, the performance, of our bodies. The performance is like the air filled with a sound of something that is only the breath of the world. The performance is like the body that moves with the light of the air, with the breath of the spirit. Of course, Stephan Micus has gone past all that, and there is only the life within us to mourn the life that has passed behind us, that passes us in the understanding that the world we are is the world at the top of the mountain, the beard of the oldest man, the cell of the unborn child. The oldest man and the unborn child, of course, are each like us, what we once were, what we will be, what we close our eyes to see. Is he like us? He is more than "like", he is what is, which is us.