The German musician/composer Stephan Mircus has been playing his vast and often bewildering armoury of specialist percussion instruments - Himalayan horse bells, Burmese kyeezee gongs, Swedish nyckelharpa key fiddles - for decades now. His 24 (mainly) ECM recordings showcase questing curiousity and vivid imagineering alongside multi-instrumental prowess. A cult hero in the outsider mode of, say, Moondog, with the free-form creativity of an Ornette Coleman or a Terry Reilly, Micus' musical journeys are fired by sonic details from Bavaria and Borneo to Siberia and South America, and arranged in ways both spacious and (less so here) brow-furrowingly complicated.

This, his 25th solo album, is a paean to the gods of thunder, as celebrated by nine global traditions. Tracks featuring all manner of aural objets d'art keep nuance to the fore, even with frequent presence of the Tibetan dung chen trumpet. Four metres long, with a tone likened to the singing of elephants, the dung chen proclaims authoritatively and even poignantly through odes to the muscle-flexing likes of Thor, Zeus, the Yoruba/American deity Changó and Japan's thunder, lightning and storm god Raijin, each track distinguished by multi-part flourishes that demand careful listening.

Micus' wish is that the destructive power of these (global warming?) thundergods be placated by the recording, a work of epiphany-inducing insight and swirling epic power. Fascinating stuff.