Pascal Niggenkemper: D'une rive à l'autre

Tuvalu is a tiny Western Pacific island nation with a rich cultural life, but it may not be around much longer. From the consequences of climate change, scientists expect that Turvalu will be uninhabitable in a few decades, taken back by the rising ocean. And that's why bassist/composer Pascal Niggenkemper wants you to know about it before it disappears altogether.

Niggenkemper put together Ensemble Tuvalu to express artistically how we deal with the loss of habitats and cultures due to the ravages of climate change. The resulting album, Ensemble Tuvalu—d'une rive à l'autre, brings together an international cast of musicians from the U.S., France, Germany, Austria, Belgium, Switzerland, and Greece to perform in four duos simultaneously: Artemis Vavatsika and Tizia Zimmermann on accordion, Mona Matbou Riahi and Joachim Badenhorst on clarinet, Ben LaMar Gay on cornet and Louis Laurain on trumpet, Elisabeth Coudoux on cello and Pascal Niggenkemper on double bass and sound installation with all participating in percussion. They also use traditional Tuvaluan songs and poems as texts throughout the performance, singing or speaking in seven different languages.

The album is a fever dream, with voices drifting in and out, sometimes recognizable, sometimes not, over instruments that sound familiar but not quite. Altogether, it is a profound presentation. This is a story about the end of a culture and a people, so the music is not easy listening. But it is imaginative and interesting and heartfelt.

And adventurous. The percussion is played with mallets, metal chains, table tennis balls, and other small objects on drums and metal discs amplified with exciters as well as by the musicians using their instruments percussively, such as banging on the side of the bass or pumping the keys of the clarinet. The cello and accordions offer droning backgrounds for the horns to bleat and squeal over. Vocals, sung and spoken, come and go over the music in different languages (including, on one song, the artist/poet Jaumes Privat speaking in Occitan, an endangered language from southern France, fitting the theme of lost cultures). This is an album that is best listened to from start to finish as the moods and tones shift, from ambient to free improvisation and everything in between. While the album may not save Tuvalu or do anything about climate change, it certainly will, as Niggenkemper states in the liner notes, "make people aware about different realities through our music."