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, Tagaq is an original disruptor, a world-changing figure at the forefront of seismic social, political and environmental change.
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.
Tongues 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.
Accolades: Polaris Music Prize Winner + Short List nomination, Juno Award Winner, Scotiabank Giller Prize Nominee, TIFF premiere of co-directed bio doc, “Ever Deadly.”