Ivan Otis
Tagaq mixes tradition with experimentation.
The otherworldly sounds created by Tanya Tagaq tingle the spine and jar the brain.
Tagaq’s music — a blend of traditional Inuit throat singing, jazz, electronica and hip-hop — spans generations, genres and even species. Sometimes her haunting vocalizations sound like animals growling and snarling over pulsating grooves. Yet even as she pushes past recognizable boundaries, Tagaq can also deliver soothing sweetness, a blanket of snow drifting onto a jagged ice-covered landscape.
Tagaq will appear at the Memorial Union’s Fredric March Play Circle on Nov. 21. Now an international sensation who has toured with Björk and the Kronos Quartet, the Inuk artist (Inuk is the singular form of Inuit) grew up in Cambridge Bay, Nunavut, a Victoria Island outpost in the vast Arctic Archipelago region, a 550,000-square-mile area inhabited by just 14,000 people.
Her public persona is rife with Arctic imagery; she appears in photos wrapped in fur and feathers, even wearing antlers — surrounded by wolves, elk and snow. “It’s very cold, ice freezes over, there are no trees,” says Tagaq, describing her homeland. “After traveling around, I realized how unique the landscape is. It’s powerful.”
Powerful, too, is Tagaq’s connection with nature. Her most recent album, 2014’s Animism, features song titles such as “Umingmak” (Musk oxen), “Caribou,” “Rabbit,” “Howl,” “Dance Animal Spirits,” “Genetic Memory” and a chilling final track called “Fracking,” in which she vocalizes the sounds of the earth responding to hydraulic fracturing.
Tagaq flips the natural order of things in her songs. “We’re animals and they’re people,” she says. “We’re not special, we’re not the best, we’re not the top. We’re just part of whatever’s going on. I get a little embarrassed about being human. I like to be around animals and think about them and their freedom.”
For her Madison appearance, Tagaq will perform with frequent collaborators violinist Jesse Zubot and percussionist Jean Martin. The trio will be improvising a live soundtrack to the 1922 silent film classic, Nanook of the North, commissioned in 2012 by the Toronto International Film Festival.
In an interview with the CBC, Tagaq called Nanook a product of its time, noting it contained “a bunch of bullshit happy Eskimo stereotypes.” She says the improvisation project, composed by Derek Charke, is a way to reclaim images of her homeland. No two performances are alike, she adds.
“We are lucky because we magically seem to be speaking the same language,” says Tagaq of her collaborators. “We open up musically to ground that hasn’t been covered before.”
While continuing to expand musical boundaries, Tagaq is gaining recognition. Animism won the Juno Award for Aboriginal Album of the Year, and it also received the Polaris Prize, the top Canadian music award. Her touring schedule is nonstop; since July, she has performed at Bonnaroo, Toronto, Helsinki, Dublin, Chicago, New York and Iceland. She often brings her children, ages 3 and 12, with her on tour.
Like other bold experimenters, such as Yoko Ono or Björk, Tagaq is not trying to please everyone. She says she prefers theaters and ticketed shows to festivals because she’s less worried about “freaking people out.” But she also doesn’t mind if audience members leave her shows. “I don’t want to share with people that don’t want to take it in,” she says. “It’s very intimate. It’s myself. I don’t want people that don’t enjoy it to be present. I feel safer when the people that don’t like it leave.”
“I don’t know why anyone would think everyone should like them,” says Tagaq. “I’m just happy and surprised when people like it.”
