Jens Düppe & Simin Tander

In 2023 Jens Düppe was asked to expand his solo percussion programme “ego_D” into a duo for the “Romanesque Summer” and perform it in Cologne’s St. Maria im Kapitol church. The special thing about this programme is that Düppe plays drums, piano and synthesizer at the same time. His keyboard instruments, which he usually plays with his left hand and left foot, are positioned at a 90-degree angle to his drum set. In a way this creates a limitation but it becomes the impulse for the peculiar flow of the music. The archaic-mystical, the spiritual-ritual is then given its very own twist by the vocals of German-Afghan Simin Tander who has been playing in a duo with Düppe in Cologne since this “Romanesque Summer”. She circles around the patterns with her melismatic vocal garlands and mysteriously heterogeneous atmospheres develop in the harmony between her dark-coloured alto voice and the rhythms of the drums. The hybrid is emphasised even more because Tander sings in both English and Pashtu, the mother tongue of her Afghan father, a journalist and poet, and also improvises with language per se.