“Our island knows the ocean is not the same as before” | The Return of Small Island Big Song

With a long blast on a conch – the seashell containing the ocean – the ceremony begins: a paean to the Earth, to our own precious island. Taking part in the ritual are over a dozen artists from the Indo-Pacific region, their roots strong, their message urgent, their music both powerful and moving. Alongside them and represented by found sounds (bird song, rustling palm fronds, the happy noise of children splashing in the shallows) is Nature herself, a key player in all 14 tracks of Our Island, a concept album conceived by producers Tim Cole and BaoBao Chen and buoyed by collaborators from island nations from across the Indian and Pacific Oceans.

Tracks roll into each other, undulating like waves, containing stories of culture and environment. Each champions a unique ancestral heritage while musing on the same leading question: ‘What does the Earth, our island, mean to you?’ The artists’ spoken-word answers bridge the songs. “Our island is like a warm mother,” states Putad, a singer, surfer and erstwhile grunge rocker from the Amis nation people of Taiwan. “Our island knows the ocean is not the same as before. Our island feels nature is disappearing.”

“Our island is the whole world sharing a piece of paradise,” declaims Emlyn, a Mauritian vocalist, dancer and environmental campaigner at the vanguard of a movement of Indian Ocean performers reclaiming their unique rhythms and cultural mix. “Our island is losing too much nature for concrete.”

Our Island is the much-anticipated follow-up to Small Island Big Song, the 2018 album and multi-platform project conceived by Melbourne-born producer and filmmaker Tim Cole and Taiwanese producer BaoBao Chen. The winner of the Songlines Music Award 2019 in the Asia & Pacific category, Small Island Big Song featured artists from 16 nations linked by a Polynesian seafaring heritage and a shared concern for the steady loss of nature and culture in the Pacific and Indian Ocean regions. That work was the result of the three years Cole and Chen spent visiting artists on their islands, filming and audio recording as they went.

“Our island is the whole world sharing a piece of paradise… Our island is losing too much nature for concrete” (Emlyn, Mauritius)

“Culture defines our relationship to the natural and social environment, and vice-versa,” says Cole, sitting beside Chen outside their A-frame house in the mountains of central Taiwan. “We met people on their islands and recorded a song in their language. Then we took that song to another island and overdubbed more vocals and instruments and so on. The idea was to capture and unify the essence of all these places, and through reunifying heritage, creating a statement about humankind’s relationship to the earth and the oceans. We met incredible musicians who became friends, and planned to record a conventional album together in a studio, where we’d jam and play music and laugh and cry over the issues.” He pauses and smiles. “We found the core musicians, most of whom happened to be women, and we had the session booked in Australia. But then came this virus, which had other ideas. So we couldn’t actually meet in person.”

Our Island is a collaborative project, nevertheless. Weekly Zoom meetings fostered relationships between the group’s members, including spoken-word artist and climate warrior Selina Leem of the Marshall Islands; singer and educator Sauljaljui of the Paiwan nation of Taiwan; singer Vaiteani and multi-instrumentalist Luc Totterwitz of popular Tahitian duo Vaiteani; master percussionist, log drummer and hip-hop-informed label boss Airileke Ingram from Australia and Papua New Guinea; and Madagascar’s Sammy ‘Tarika’ Andriamalalaharijaona on the valiha, a tubular harp made from bamboo. “We were all isolated on our respective islands but the internet brought us together,” says Chen. “Tim and I suggested that musical ideas should begin with people drawing from their own culture first, using instruments that have a direct relationship to themselves and their homelands.”

Luc Totterwitz, Tahiti/France

Visibility of the new project was paramount considering that a 36-date concert and workshop tour of American universities from Stanford in California to Miami Dade College was scuppered by the pandemic, and is rescheduled for 2022. Video footage shot by Cole and Chen on their original Small Island Big Song sojourn, supplemented by the work of drone units, underwater cinematographers and other production crew, make for a multisensory experience both live and online. Our Island is a project that commands attention.

With its collaborative aesthetic, sumptuous video and compelling, deftly mixed sound, lead single ‘Listwar Zanset’ (The Story of Our Ancestors) is a case in point. “Our ancestry is the seed of our life,” says Emlyn, who wrote the bones of the song after hearing stories of Maroon slaves working in the cane fields of Mauritius, their singing silenced, their songs and language banned. “We can only imagine the hardship. The memory of their struggle – and of the colonisation imposed on other cultures across the world – must be kept alive.”

“In Tahiti we call our traditional choral songs himenes… These voices really speak to your ‘a’au [gut] and to your soul” (Vaiteani, Tahiti)

Singing while playing upbeat séga rhythms (originating in Madagascar and heard, too, in La Réunion) on the ravanne (frame drum) and kalimba (thumb piano), Emlyn hums through the middle of the song – recalling the slaves who would hum in defiance of their captors who refused to allow them to sing. As her voice increases in intensity it is joined by the overtone chanting of Putad, the pair reclaiming identities repressed by colonisation and slavery. Instruments add texture and nuance: the moon lute of Sauljaljui; the valiha (and vocals) of Tarika Sammy; the warup and kundu (drums) of Airileke; the electric guitar of Luc Totterwitz and a retro Korg MS20 keyboard played by Tim Cole. Towards the end, Selina Leem, whose Marshall Islands will soon be submerged under water if climate change is not urgently addressed, pleads ‘their people displaced their land, taken my land, drowning.’

“Everyone brings a really unique personal and cultural voice, and the sum of this collaboration is way beyond what any of us could imagine or achieve alone,” says Cole. “To hear different languages, each carrying their own sense of history and place, together with the musical voices, has real substance and depth. Personal narratives telling of relationships to the environment, together with the looming climate crisis, all give Our Island undeniable impact. I really believe that as much as we need air, food and shelter we have a brain that needs stories. We need to make sense of every step we take. Our musical mission is to be as honest as possible, to help inform people’s narratives and ultimately, drop a massive stone in the global cultural pond so that everyone will be like, ‘What was that?’”

Sauljaljui, Taiwan

On a wall inside Cole and Chen’s A-frame house is an old vinyl record given to Cole by a local vendor (“around here you just buy things through the windows of people’s front rooms”), onto which he’s attached the track list for Our Island. More specifically, a Side 1 and Side 2, each featuring seven tracks. The tracks are each presented by a core band member, aside from the opening track introducing the ensemble and the Side 1 closer, a group take on Marvin Gaye’s ‘Mercy Mercy Me (The Ecology)’. It’s a clever choice; never has the line ‘things ain’t what they used to be’ felt so pertinent.

“For me the concept album is a work of art. A process that brings everything together,” says Cole, a former member of seminal Australian sextet Not Drowning, Waving, which was formed in 1983 by vocalist and keyboardist David Bridie (founder and artistic director of the Melanesia-infused Wantok Music Foundation) and guitarist John Philips, and whose free-form ambient soundscapes took in natural acoustic and atmospheric dynamics – and involved Papua New Guinean musicians including George Telek. “This journey began with the two months I spent in Papua New Guinea with Not Drowning, Waving, which shifted my Western mindset around music. The cultural lineage opened other perspectives and dimensions, as did my later work with Indigenous Australian artists such as Archie Roach and Bart Willoughby, and especially with First Nations communities in central Australia. I learned about boundaries and protocols.”

It was to Cole that the Our Island artists sent their individual recordings. Cole then compiled and edited and sent the recordings back with suggestions for extra instruments, or with further ideas that dovetailed with those of the artist. “Because BaoBao and I had been able to visit the artists pre-pandemic, and record with them on a beach, next to a river or in a rainforest, every song has a dedicated natural sound that I am mixing in as loud as the vocals. It’s an album where nature is really making a statement.”

The tune ‘Ta’u Tama’ (Our Child), featuring Vaiteani, is dedicated to the couple’s baby son and expresses concerns about coral bleaching and the legacy left for future generations. The song started as stripped down guitar and vocals and then evolved into a multi-textured ensemble piece. Putad added a chant she improvised on the beach where her grandfather taught her to swim (‘I hope in the future my son, my daughter, my grandson and granddaughter still have the same beach, never change’); Sauljaljui beat time with mortar and pestle; Yoko Tuki of Rapa Nui (Easter Island) contributed ukulele; Airileke played the Samoan pate (a struck hand drum fashioned from a hollow log); and natural and village soundscapes were recorded in Kavieng in Papa New Guinea’s New Ireland province.

“In Tahiti we call our traditional choral songs himenes,” says Vaiteani. “I always thought they sounded super weird when I was a child, but now I recognise their beauty. These voices really speak to your ‘a’au [gut] and to your soul. This is what we tried to do with ‘Ta’u Tama’.”

“If this is the story for our islands, this is the story for the whole world,” declaims Leem towards the end of the song, a soundbite of her address, aged 18, at the 2015 Paris Climate Conference – an excerpt of which also features in the visuals. In October Leem was one of several Pacific Young Climate Leaders calling for urgent action ahead of COP26.

The mighty ‘Putasanga’ (Nature) featuring Putad is a tune that begins with a spoken-word piece by four generations of women from the matriarchal Amis nation, each one a member of Putad’s family. A dreamlike video directed by Hung Shih-ting and shot entirely in Taitung on Taiwan’s south-east Pacific coast re-enacts the feeling of being swept away by a tidal rip, mirroring Putad’s near-death experience while surfing in the ocean a decade ago. “I almost died because I didn’t respect the ocean,” she told Cole and Chen. “I didn’t watch the way the current was going so I could find the channel and paddle out. The ocean just threw me into the waves. This song is about the power of nature and the love for the mother, for family.”

Our Island will be released on digital platforms as individual tracks and as a complete Side 1 and Side 2 continual listening experience. There’s also a physical edition packaged inside tapa cloth, including a recyclable 52-page booklet and make-your-own ‘Our Island’ globe. And then there’s the tour – the US first, then Europe, (hopefully) the UK and, still to be confirmed, Australia. “We will begin each concert with the blowing of the conch [which is played by Māori songman Horomona Horo on the album]. Then artists will enter from different corners of the stage, introduced on screen while singing out a refrain that represents their identity and island before joining in a chant led by Sauljaljui and backed by a powerful battery of drums from the Indian Ocean and the Pacific,” says Cole. “It builds and builds from the simplest beginning into something epic.”

Chen nods, “like the waves of the ocean.”

This article originally appeared in the January/February 2022 issue of Songlines magazine. Never miss an issue – subscribe today

Read the review of Small Island Big Song’s album, 'Our Island', in the Songlines Reviews Database