“With improvisation, there isn't such a cerebral idea or solid concept in the interpretation,” Tagaq tells Apple Music, “but with word, it's very concise and it guides you down a river as opposed to floating in an ocean. And while her longtime bandmates Jesse Zubot (violin) and Jean Martin (percussion) make return appearances, Tagaq’s musical DNA has been radically altered by producer Saul Williams and mixer Gonjasufi, who re-situate her graphic, bloodlusty treatises on colonialism, survival, and motherhood in a claustrophobic collage of icy electronics and queasy bass frequencies. But where 2016’s Retribution occasionally framed its impressionistic improvisations with spoken-word commentary, Tongues, Tagaq’s fifth studio album, fully embraces the narrative form, as she unleashes her signature screams more strategically in service of poems recited from her 2018 novel/magical-realist memoir Split Tooth. On past records and in her harrowing live performances, the artist from Cambridge Bay (Iqaluktuuttiaq), Nunavut, has deployed the Inuk tradition of throat-singing to viscerally personify the trauma she’s experienced-sexual abuse, Canada’s genocidal residential school system, the environmental degradation of her homeland-and used her guttural growls to summon a sound not unlike free jazz or metal. Over the course of her career, Tanya Tagaq has committed herself to the cathartic and, at times, deeply uncomfortable process of transforming horror into healing.
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