SOUNDS AROUND TOWN : Ancient Tracks : Ojai resident Pascal Nabet-meyer has recorded the haunting, exotic music of Rapa, a remote South Pacific island.

In the ever-shrinking cultural network of the global village, genuinely exotic ethnic music is getting rarer by the year. It takes a crusader zeal to explore new ethnomusicological traditions.

And it was the pursuit of such cultural treasures that took Ojai resident Pascal Nabet-meyer, recording equipment in tow, to the remote island of Rapa last year.

The results of his field-recording is an album by the Tahitian Choir called “Rapa Iti,” recently released on the Triloka label. It turns out to be one of the prizes of the world music season, and quite possibly an important missing link in the understanding of South Pacific culture.

On many levels, the project is a true find.

Nabet-meyer is a man of many hats: songwriter, producer, multi-instrumentalist and now ethnomusicologist. Until recently, he was also the husband of Rickie Lee Jones, with whom he has a 4-year-old daughter, Charlotte Rose.

Located 1,000 miles southeast of Tahiti--the last island before the South Pole-- Rapa is a tiny outpost, almost literally at the end of the earth. Its detachment from surrounding South Pacific islands has left its musical legacy relatively unadulterated. Meanwhile, the indigenous music of Tahiti, like that of Hawaii and other Pacific islands, has been generally diluted, Westernized and gentrified.

“I’m a very intuitive person; I go with my gut,” Nabet-meyer said in his French-inflected English, in a recent interview at a restaurant in Oak View. “When you go with your senses, you find things. I think there are still a few places on Earth where you can still go and discover things. Nobody sings like this. This is a new mode.”

The project had a missionary-like intensity for the producer: “At the time when I was recording, I was in full levitation; I was three feet above the ground. I was facing something I never heard before. It was a dream for me.”

At once foreign and familiar sounding, the choir is 126 voices strong, the entire adult population of the Rapa’s 328 residents. They sing with a raw joyousness and a rare primal richness. At the same time, the imprint left by Protestant missionaries has given their choral music a curious link to American gospel and Germanic hymns.

The music belies a legacy of hardships in the island’s history. The explorer Vancouver “discovered” the island in 1791 and promptly introduced diseases that decimated the population. Religious indoctrination arrived courtesy of various missionaries visiting over the centuries. In the 1800s, Peruvians exploited the population for purposes of slavery.

The most striking pieces on the album involve an ancient musical language using ear-bending microtonal scales--notes between the standard Western 12-tone scale. “The concept is from space, from a consciousness which has disappeared,” says Nabet-meyer.

On songs such as “Morotiri Nei,” the choir modulates downward in alien-sounding increments, falling between the cracks of the scales to which Westerners are accustomed. To some ears, this is primitive beauty of the most exotic and haunting kind. To others, it might be a sonic burr in the ear.

These “quarter-tone” songs belong to the tradition of “Himene Ruau,” which is considered taboo by the Christian evangelical standards of the island.

Nabet-meyer commented: “Most of these songs are about the afterworld--about people who have been through there, through the cycle of death and are coming back. I’m talking about something from before the arrival of the missionaries. The original lyrics are pagan. My translation of ‘pagan’ would be involving several gods--one god for one purpose.

“When they went to sing the old songs, it was like a sort of incantation, something straight from the skies. It was amazing.”

The songs in the “Himene Nota” tradition--notated music--come closer to what you’d find in Western hymnals, but still with an distinctive touch. The “Tuki” songs are war songs from the 1800s, during the era of slavery, when cannibalism--eating one’s enemies--was common practice.

It was during the production of Jones’ last album, “Pop Pop,” that Nabet-meyer felt the urge to explore the Rapa music, which he had first encountered while living in Tahiti in the early 1980s.

“Everything was under control, and I just said to my wife: ‘There is something I’ve wanted to do for 10 years. It’s the right time. I feel that somebody is watching me. I don’t know where I’m going, but I have to do it.’ ”

He quickly made arrangements for the trip, learning how to operate special recording equipment for conditions in which the humidity which can reach 98%. Last March, he caught a plane to Tubai, and then took the five-day trip on a cargo ship--one of only four a year--to Rapa.

There, he met the local pastor who would become his principal liaison and translator during the two-and-a-half months Nabet-meyer spent on the island.

Tapes in hand, Nabet-meyer returned home with the hopes of securing a record contract for his special musical treasure. “I just didn’t want to change anything,” he said. “People from the music industry came back and said, ‘Don’t you want to adapt that to rap music or do it like Paul Simon? Why don’t you send it to Paul Simon?’ I said: ‘I don’t want to. This is all about these people, and it’s me, too.’ ”

Feeling dejected by the lukewarm response, he backed off. “I thought I’d put it in my library and give it to my daughter Charlotte when she’s 20, if she wants to be a musicologist. She’d have something to work with.”

His attitude changed last December, after learning of a hurricane which destroyed much of the island. “Another voice came to me, where I had to go back and try to fight for these people, basically to bring the fruit of their labor back alive. After what they’ve been through, over centuries of struggle, colonialists, the church, I couldn’t give up on it.”

Through his friend Walter Becker, formerly of Steely Dan and the producer of Rickie Lee Jones’ “Flying Cowboys” album, Nabet-meyer made the connection with Triloka, which responded within 12 hours of hearing the tapes.

Nabet-meyer is involved in other projects, including producing jazz trumpeter Rick Brown and contemplating the course of his own solo career. But, for the moment, Rapa is foremost on his mind. He plans to return to the island to work on a PBS documentary.

“Rapa is the only island in the South Pacific which has the original culture intact, really,” Nabet-meyer commented. “That’s why when you listen to it, it just goes into the past.

“There is a mystery behind it. The energy is so intense. The old name of Rapa is ‘the center of the earth.’ This tells me, if you believe in stories about continents which have disappeared or moved over 30,000 years ago, Rapa would be sitting in the center of a continent which has disappeared.

“The quality of the voices and songs could provide part of the answers. These are the tracks of an ancient civilization.”