Douz

Ti’Kaniki is a group of eight young singers and percussionists from Lyon in France who share a love for maloya, the musical and poetic spearhead of Creole Réunionese culture. After seven years of intense sessions and concerts throughout Europe, they have brought out their first album. Maloya’s call-and-response songs and ternary percussive patterns privately celebrate the memory of enslaved ancestors on La Réunion.

Like some of their peers, Ti’Kaniki, by performing this style to a wider audience, are still connected to sacred values while moving towards a more open poetry. Carried by sustained floating tempos played on traditional low-tuned rouleur drum, the emblematic flat rattle kayamb, or the meditative sound of the local bobre bow (related to the Brazilian berimbau), words flow gently throughout the 12 tunes composed by band members.

The strong and complex beats in no way shroud the introspection and nostalgia on this opus, as in ‘Molem’, where singer Cindy Pooch delivers a sort of melancholic prayer, pining for her native country. It is in this expression of infinite gentleness that some of the tracks succeed brilliantly and one can feel this during ‘Bor an Bor’, which describes the destiny of migrants, and ‘Zordi’, a musical masterpiece written by Hadrien Santos da Silva, evoking a state of separation and what it is to be different.