Ok, you're here today for Around the Worldmusic, well last week we were in the desert..of sand, this week we crossed over to the snow desert of Northern Canada where Tanya Tagaq Gillis was born and her grandmother provided her the genes to become a throat singer-songwriter. She came into contact with Bjork, these two clicked and Tanya got the chance to expose her skills to the world, this resulted in world tours with Bjork and the Kronow Quartet and the recording of an award winning album..Sinaa...
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Tagaq - Sinaa ( 05 ^ 95 mb)
Animalistic grunts, growls and gasps. Earth-rumbling groans. Ethereal whispers and euphoric wails. A lot of provocative things come out of Tagaq’s mouth. But something you won’t hear escape from the Inuk throat singer’s lips is any talk of representing her native traditions. Tanya Tagaq Gillis (Tagaq) is from Cambridge Bay (Ikaluktuutiak), Nunavut, Canada, on the south coast of Victoria Island. After attending school in Cambridge Bay she went, at age 15, to Yellowknife, Northwest Territories to attend high school where she first began to practice throat singing. She later studied visual arts at the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design University and while there developed her own solo form of Inuit throat singing, which is normally done by two women.
As Tagaq is quick to remind newcomers to the genre, Inuit throat singing is more of a competition than a musical practice. Two participants, usually women, stand face to face and produce a complex series of vocal sounds and rhythms, repeating motifs that often imitate the sounds of nature and wildlife. Each tries to trip up the other, and the game ends when one either cracks up or is out of breath. The songs that have evolved from it are some of Canada’s oldest compositions. Meanwhile, the material on Tagaq’s award-winning debut CD, Sinaa, qualifies easily as some of the freshest, featuring intense vocalizations in both English and Inuk, at times mixed with tribal beats.
Somewhat surprisingly, Tagaq’s exposure to throat singing came not in her hometown but while she was away at art school in Halifax. “When I was growing up in Cambridge Bay, it wasn’t happening,” she recalls. “Nobody spoke the language any more either.” But one day, a care package arrived at her college apartment from her mom, stuffed with “socks, Mr. Noodles and some cassette tapes and CDs of throat singing she had tucked away.” Suddenly, the girl whose first record purchase was Michael Jackson’s Thriller, who grew to love alternative rock and rave music, was grooving to a whole new sound. “I didn’t realize how homesick I was until I got those tapes,” she explains. “Those songs I had never heard, but I knew them, I understood them. It was the sound of home.”
Tagaq, whose grandmother was a singer-songwriter and who had always loved performing, was immediately inspired. She trained her singing voice, that quickly developed into a forceful tool for Tagaq to compose her own material. Eight of the 12 tracks on Sinaa are originals, improvisations based on throat-singing techniques but leaping forward into unknown territory, like the first spring step off the ice floe.
A fortuitous connection had Tagaq's singing at an art festival in Inuvik taped and land on Björk's desk. She enlisted Tagaq as part of a Northern chorus for her 2000 world tour, which brought the Canadian singer her first worldwide exposure. But the pairing may have had an even greater impact on Björk, whose 2004 disc Medulla was made (almost) entirely from vocalizations. She even brought Tagaq into the studio for back-ups, where the pair accidentally co-wrote the experimental lullaby “Ancestors.” The track appears on Sinaa, an album that was recorded in Spain over three days in 2004 and on which she attempted to produce and capture every noise she could imagine.
The disc, features txalaparta drumming by duo Ugarte Anaiak and has won three Aboriginal Music Awards, but, as Tagaq stresses, it is not traditional music. What I’m doing is following an emotion that drives me. I am not trying to represent the North. This is a completely selfish expression. I’m from Nunavut, so it’s a big part of me. But I’m also a very sexual person, I’m hedonistic, I like spicy food, hot baths, sweaty, intense sex. Her innovative, solo style of throat singing seeks to push the boundaries of emotion and to express the primitive instincts she believes still reside deep within our flesh. She describes her evolution over the past six years as a process of going deeper and deeper into her performance to the point where she virtually “leaves her body” and lets the expression take over.
In 2005, her CD entitled Sinaa (Inuktitut for "edge") was nominated for five awards at the Canadian Aboriginal Music Awards. At the ceremony on 25 October 2005, the CD won awards for Best Producer/Engineer, Best Album Design and Tagaq herself won the Best Female Artist award. Sinaa was nominated for the 2006 Juno Awards as the Best Aboriginal Recording.
She appeared live with the Kronos quartet at New York City’s famed Carnegie Hall and joined them this fall in Austria. Sadly, while she has toured across Europe and much of Canada, she rarely gets to perform in the North. Between gigs, plans for the follow-up to Sinaa are well on their way. The singer wants to take much more time with it, going “deeper in all directions” and incorporating new sounds, instruments and vocal styles along with the throat singing. Her upcoming album, Auk/Blood will feature collaborations with Mike Patton, among others.
01 - Sila (3:28)
02 - Still (3:11)
03 - Qimiruluapik (2:02)
04 - Qiujaviit (3:04)
05 - Surge (3:24)
06 - Ancestors (4:08)
07 - Uvinik (2:54)
08 - Ilunikavi (3:02)
09 - Seamless (3:01)
10 - Origin (2:42)
11- Suluk (3:50)
12 - Breather (5:27)
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All downloads are in * ogg-7 (224k) or ^ ogg-9(320k), artwork is included , if in need get the nifty ogg encoder/decoder here !
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