This album announced itself as immediately remarkable to me for featuring one of the largest number of instruments (calculated as a percentage of the overall number featured) I'd never heard of before. Guitar, voice, zither – yes, I already knew about them. But nyckelharpa? Balanzikom? Nope. I shouldn't blame myself, as German musician Stephan Micus is a bit of a specialist in discovering and playing instruments that are obscure to most. He's no musicological purist, though: he likes mixing and matching instruments, taking them from different parts of the world and putting them together in unwonted combinations, and writing his own compositions for them too. (All of the music on Inland Sea is original.) His manner of playing the central instrument here, the nyckelharpa – a kind of keyed fiddle that is, apparently, the national instrument of Sweden – is unconventional too: in Sweden they wear it round the neck like a guitar, whereas Micus holds it upright between his knees like a cello. Even his singing is unconventional: the words to the likes of ‘Flor del Sur’ are in his own made-up language. The result is a disc of highly unusual textures and tones, idiosyncratically fantastical in expression. Fascinating fact (from Wikipedia): Micus is that rare thing: an ECM artist (this is his 22nd solo album for the label) whose recordings are not produced by Manfred Eicher.