Pascal Niggenkemper / Ensemble Tuvalu
D’une Rive À L’Autre
FRANCE SUBRAN MUSIQUES AVENTUREUSES subran 07 CD (2026)
Pascal Niggenkemper is the French-German composer and bass player who impressed us heavily with his 2016 piece Talking Trash – an astonishing work of composed improvisation for an ensemble of players which drew our attention to a global pollution problem, that of plastic bags and other detritus in the world’s oceans. Worth pausing to recall the scale of that particular aspect of mankind’s destructive and wasteful tendencies – these floating mounds of trash have become so large that they’re almost like floating continents, a problem to file alongside the recent electro-acoustic composition about “fatbergs” in the sewers, as highlighted by Iain Chambers and Kate Carr.
Well, Niggenkemper’s here today with another remarkable piece which continues his environmental concerns, this time focussed on the Tuvalu archipelago in the Western Pacific. The theme this time is rising sea levels, now reaching crisis point and threatening to turn Tuvalu into a “sinking nation”; the root cause is very likely to be the effects of climate change, and what we’re looking at is a possible fundamental mass-migration of the inhabitants and the total loss of part of the world’s culture through this unwelcome change to the habitation. Another one who has been pointing out the exact same problem is fellow musician Mike Cooper; for instance on his Playing With Water record from 2020 we noted how he has been making music themed on this ecological disaster for about 20 years, casting his critical eye around areas of the Pacific, South-East Asia and the Caribbean which he knows so well. In 1999 he made Kiribati, another Pacific island which is losing homes and habitats due to rising sea levels.
For his part, Pascal Niggenkemper has devised an imaginative and creative approach to this concerning theme, with two ingenious concepts to reinforce the message along with the music. There are eight musicians, all acoustic improvisers, also performing as vocalists; and a poet. The first concept is the stage plan, reflecting the composer’s skills for sound design – Ensemble Tuvalu form a circle around a number of “sounding islands”, and the stage itself is surrounded by a number of “sounding curtains”. It’s a very simple stylised arrangement which symbolises the geography of Tuvalu itself, representing the archipelago in miniature right there on stage. Secondly, we have the use of text and poetry, to emphasise the very human nature of the imminent catastrophe; it so happens the musicians are drawn from a range of nationalities, and each player contributes a poem or text in their own language – French, German, English, Farsi, Greek, and Occitan. The message couldn’t be more clear – this is the whole world’s concern. Right there we’ve got the good intentions of the United Nations Environment Programme and the UN Refugee Agency clearly expressed, except it’s done in an artistic manner and it gets right to the point with no red tape or committee discussion. This allows the listener to appreciate an hour of beautiful improvised-composed acoustic music plus texts and poetry, played on woodwinds, accordions, cello, and brass. And as Julia Neupert points out in her sleeve note, the music “sounds less gloomy than one might expect”, reflecting on the apocalyptic subject matter; she points out the light and the dark in the music, the delicate and playful moments in the performances.
Rather than emerging as a droney hand-wringing dirge about the perils of environmental ruin and the damage of climate change, D’une Rive À L’Autre is a statement about our shared humanity, the need to connect our lives to our community, a warning to protect our fragile culture, as well as concern for our fellow peoples, and the whole piece may contain elements of hope in among these darker messages. Very good. The CD is a studio recording, but the package includes a DVD of a live performance at Tollhaus Karlsruhe from 2024. From 13 Feb 2026.