From Ikaluktutiak (Cambridge Bay, Nunavut), internationally celebrated artist Tanya Tagaq is an improvisational singer, avant-garde composer and bestselling author. A member of the Order of Canada, Polaris Music Prize and JUNO Award winner, and recipient of multiple honorary doctorates as well as a special mention for her film score to Bootlegger, which premiered at the Kimolos International Film Festival, Tagaq is an original disruptor, a world-changing figure at the forefront of seismic social, political and environmental change.

You don’t think about what’s underfoot until it stirs. Tanya Tagaq, an experimental, improvisational, exceptional artist, has felt the land beneath her shake. To survive, you have to know what you’re doing. To survive, you have to trust in the body. Tagaq’s power, her voice, still comes from this place, where to defy nature is doom.

Tongues, Tagaq’s new album, enters deep chasms and dangerous spaces. Produced by Saul Williams and mixed by Gonjasufi, Tagaq’s Tongues speaks not to horrors and crisis, as previous Tagaq albums wordlessly, powerfully encircled, but directly of these things. Tongues is Tagaq at her most explicit and specific. Delicate, poetic passages from Split Tooth, Tagaq’s bestselling, award winning mythobiography, crash against an industrial, electronic exoskeleton.

Geoff Berner, novelist, shit disturber and chronicler of Tagaq’s albums, the Polaris Music Prize winning Animism and Retribution, explains, “Tanya Tagaq’s new album is a manual for inner and outer revolution. It is the soundtrack of righteous taking-back of personhood and power. It is a triumph of strength and intelligence that invites the listener to join her in a personal victory over colonization, over those who take without consent.”

“Tongues is a journey into a psychic place of healing, rebirth and artistic Power with a capital “P” that will shake the world. You can count on Tanya Tagaq to do that.”

“The heart of Tagaq's power as an artist is in her voice, and not just due to her mastery of vocal variation. Her enunciation of concise poetry over understated rhythms is an aural experience which transcends the craft of spoken word. As she speaks her truth, she does so without stuttering, hesitating only to come up — deftly and deliberately — for air.”

Exclaim!

Photo by Katrin Braga. Download hi-res version here.

"Tongues is unflinching in its attacks on the top-down racism that First Nations people contend with, with tracks like “Colonizer” and “Teeth Agape” forcing non-indigenous audiences to face the realities of repression and subjugation over countless generations."

Bandcamp

Photo by Carlyle Routh. Download hi-res version here.

Photo by Vanessa Heins. Download hi-res version here.

Photo by Katrin Braga. Download hi-res version here.

Photo by Vanessa Heins. Download hi-res version here.

Photo by Vanessa Heins. Download hi-res version here.

Photo by Shelagh Howard. Download hi-res version here.

Photo courtesy of Live at Massey Hall. Download hi-res version here.

Photo courtesy of Live at Massey Hall. Download hi-res version here.

Photo courtesy of Live at Massey Hall. Download hi-res version here.

Photo by Vanessa Heins. Download hi-res version here.

"Tagaq projects sounds that carry the imprint of the body’s secret contours and recesses, delving far beyond personal utterance, out beyond human identity, to summon voices from the flesh cavity haunts of animal spirits and primal energies."

The Wire

"Her voice flickers like a sonic candle, rising and fading with the music. It becomes guttural as Tagaq drops to her knees, and she chitters high and desperate as she flutters her hands about her face. She sings no discernible words - it's as if she were speaking in tongues... Her work is her way of probing that interconnectedness and providing her viewers with the relief of communion."

The Los Angeles Times

"To witness Tanya Tagaq perform live is to experience a species of primal/visceral/guttural channeling-cum-exorcism... an altogether new form."

The Toronto Star

"Fiercely contemporary... Recalling animal noises and various other nature sounds, she was a dynamo, delivering a sort of gothic sound art while she stalked the small basement stage with feral energy."

The New York Times

Biography:

"She taps into humanity's most naked emotions and forces them into the spotlight... the best musical performance any of us had ever seen."

Vice Music

"Tagaq goes to places in her music that few others dare to tread."

Pitchfork

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