SOUNDTRACK: TANYA TAGAQ-“Uja” and “Umingmak” live at the Polaris Music Prize (2014).
Tanya Tagaq won the Canadian Polaris Prize this year. Tagaq is a Canadian (Inuk) throat singer from Cambridge Bay (Ikaluktuutiak), Nunavut, Canada who at age 15, went to Yellowknife, Northwest Territories to attend high school where she first began to practice throat singing. Mostly I included that so I could have the word Ikaluktuutiak in a post. She is the first native Canadian to win the prize.
Tagaq sings in a gutteral throat singing style combined with some more traditional high-pitched notes. She has worked with Mike Patton and extensively with Björk. Most of her songs don’t have lyrics per se, and the album that won the prize is called Animism.
This is a live broadcast of her set which has been describes as truly mesmerizing in person. It is certainly mesmerizing in video–marveling that the woman can sound so possessed and yet so clearly in control.
At 1:38 when the backing vocalists (who were shrouded in darkness sing out, it’s quite startling. I don’t know when the first song ends and the second begins, but at 3:48. when the drums start a regular beat, you can hear a sense of commercial rock amidst the avant garde music. Around 5 minutes the music drops away and when Tagaq sings briefly in her non-throat voice she sounds almost childish. But when the throaty growls returns, it’s a bit scary, frankly.
Tagaq has talked about bringing the sensuality of throat singing out into the public and by 7 minutes, the sensuality is right there on the stage. By the end, when she is screaming her lungs out, it has to have been really intense in the theater. And her wold howl at the end is uncanny.
Clearly not to everyone’s taste, but probably not lie anything else you’ll hear all day. And unlike anything you’d hear at the Grammy’s.
[READ: January 2, 2015] “Beyond the Shore”
This is brief story about competitiveness at the gym. It’s the kind of story that is probably acted out in gyms across the country and one which shouldn’t have been all that interesting, but Awad chose an interesting setting and characters to flesh this out.
I also enjoyed that the title has nothing to do with the action of the story. Rather, it refers to the place where they live: “Beyond the Shore, a gated-living community that has nothing to do with California (we are nowhere near California), the apartment building which overlooks the Malibu Club Spa and Fitness Centre.” Each morning when the narrator wakes up, she can see from her bedroom window that Char, an extremely depressingly fit woman, is already working out ion the gym. And most of the time she is working out on Lifecycle One, the very machine that the narrator has signed up for in fifteen minutes.
This wouldn’t be a problem except that in fifteen minutes, the narrator, who is not in peak physical shape will get to the gym and Char will still be in mid-routine with no intention of stopping. When the narrator approaches Char, Char says she’s almost done (even though she ‘s already over by five minutes) and then mutters a nasty name about the narrator under her breath. Often by the time Char gets off, the narrator has but 24 minutes in her time slot before the cardio group comes in next. (more…)
SOUNDTRACK: BJORK-Volta (2007).
Okay, so Bjork is from Mars. Volta is her newest album. I’ve been a fan of Bjork since the Sugarcubes, way back when. I’ve also really enjoyed her solo recordings. I used to get all of her singles and videos and things, but in recent years she seems to have released a new full length reissue of a concert or remastered disc on a monthly basis. So, I had to go cold turkey.
I Just Read About That... 