Album Review: Small Island Big Song - Our Island (2022)
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| Picture Credit: Small Island Big Song |
Small Island Big Song - Our Island
Release Date: January 28, 2022
Label: selfrelease
Format: CD / Digital
Length: 69:19
Genre: World Music
Origin: Taiwan / Australia
In the year 2015, producer BaoBao Chen from Taiwan and Australian film maker Tim Cole have joined forces and founded the project Small Island Big Song. Their intention is to give a voice to people that are often unheard in global debates about climate change - the inhabitants of island nations in the Pacific and Indian Oceans. The approach Chen and Cole used here differs from the typical cinematic presentation of the impact of climate change on people's lives. Instead, the artists started a multi-channel way to display the cultural heritage which is at stake when we do not stop the sea levels from rising. Therefore, Cole and Chen have filmed more than a hundred musicians performing over sixteen island nations.
Recordings by musicians from Rapa Nui, Tahiti, Papua New Guinea, The Marshall Islands, Mauritius, Taiwan, Madagascar, or Aotearoa take the listeners on a breath-taking sonic journey to regions of this planet that are hardly known to residents of so-called Western or Northern industrial nations. Traditional instruments and native languages create soundscapes that tell of a world so pure, so fragile, and so real. Small Island Big Song do not intend to romanticize these colourful images and thus they add samples from documentary reports to their songs in which the ongoing destruction of nature on our planet by humankind is concerned. The gorgeous sounds on the one hand and the bitter truth on the other hand create some severe tension that only knowns one solution: we need to act,a dn we should have started long ago.
Music-wise, one can go the easiest way and speak of World Music when talking about this collection. To be at least a little more precise, "Our Island" is a multidimensional sonic display of several traditional music styles from the Pacific and Indian Oceans' regions combined with Western contemporary music. Therefore, one can hear traditional folkloristic sounds reinterpreted with modern instruments and merged with more popular genres such as R'n'B, Calypso, or Reggae. Each of the fourteen tracks on "Our Island" is loaded with wanderlust and the urge to embrace and keep Earth's beauty.
Small Island Big Song's "Our Island" represents both, the 'Festival of the Living Ocean' and the 'Lament for a dying Ocean'. In seventy minutes, the collective presents us the incredible beauty of the planet that we call home, but also the terrible state that Mother Earth is in because of us. It is a wholesome and deeply touching sonic journey - stunning and activating simultaneously.
Music from every post will stay in the MangoRotation playlist for 14 days.
This coverage was created via Musosoup #Sustainablecurator
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