Stephan Micus is more than the sum of his parts. The German-born multi-instrumentalist has done something rare: he has absorbed, rather than stolen, a wealth of musical traditions and resources, and formed from them an entity all his own. As one of his earlier recordings for ECM, Ocean is a tinted window into an art of consummate brilliance. Part I begins with his unaffected, wordless incantation before opening into a flourish of hammered dulcimers. When the plaintive cries of the nay replace his voice, it is as if the body has become an incarnate breath, spreading its gentle web of sound in an airy sky as the meditations rise like pedestals beneath the souls. The shō (Japanese mouth organ) opens the second part by treading on clouds with its feet, each step forward being an exhalation, each step back an inhalation, so that one pauses on the edge of falling. From this collection of strings springs a shakuhachi that unwinds backward, its weary song but a dream on a wistful day. The zithers kick in with their bouncing rhythms, fluttering like the wings of a giant diurnal insect whose wing covers are its feet and for whom landing is but a memory of a past in which humans never spoke. In the opening dulcimer meditation of Part III, we sense the kinship into which Micus so deeply invites us, a promise of silence in his embrace. The shakuhachi whispers its secrets over the water, ending in a delicate waterfall in which the tears of a lifetime are condensed into a single sound and pooled in the cupped hands of silence. Part IV ends (or begins?) with a moving shō solo that turns into a rippled garden like a crystal spun from Philip Glass-like threads and melted by body heat, rolling with the song of every earthworm below. Micus allows a territory so personal to emerge that it becomes selfless and the human elements of his creation somehow go unnoticed. In his game, names, labels and covers, even personalities and politics, no longer matter. The only limitation is their absence. Such music goes beyond the pathos of meditative action and looks into the soul of silence, where only music can express what all the languages of the world, both lost and preserved, never could. Its cage is not one that surrounds us, but one that we surround with the promise of creation, waiting with eyes closed and heart open.