n MUSIC
Community Day of Thanks! Concerts
Arctic artistry Inuk throat singer Tanya Tagaq reclaims Nanook of the North BY CATHERINE CAPELLARO
The otherworldly sounds created by Tanya Tagaq tingle the spine and jar the brain. Tagaq’s music — a blend of traditional Inuit throat singing, jazz, electronica and hip-hop — spans generations, genres and even species. Sometimes her haunting vocalizations sound like animals growling and snarling over pulsating grooves. Yet even as she pushes past recognizable boundaries, Tagaq can also deliver soothing sweetness, a blanket of snow drifting onto a jagged ice-covered landscape. Tagaq will appear at the Memorial Union’s Fredric March Play Circle on Nov. 21. Now an international sensation who has toured with Björk and the Kronos Quartet, the Inuk artist (Inuk is the singular form of Inuit) grew up in Cambridge Bay, Nunavut, a Victoria Island outpost in the vast Arctic Archipelago region, a 550,000-square-mile area inhabited by just 14,000 people. Her public persona is rife with Arctic imagery; she appears in photos wrapped in fur and feathers, even wearing antlers — surrounded by wolves, elk and snow. “It’s very cold, ice freezes over, there are no trees,” says Tagaq, describing her homeland. “After traveling around, I realized how unique the landscape is. It’s powerful.” Powerful, too, is Tagaq’s connection with nature. Her most recent album, 2014’s Animism, features song titles such as “Umingmak” (Musk oxen), “Caribou,” “Rabbit,” “Howl,” “Dance Animal Spirits,” “Genetic Memory” and a chilling final track called “Fracking,” in which she vocalizes the sounds of the earth responding to hydraulic fracturing.
Tagaq mixes tradition with experimentation.
IVAN OTIS
Tagaq flips the natural order of things in her songs. “We’re animals and they’re people,” she says. “We’re not special, we’re not the best, we’re not the top. We’re just part of whatever’s going on. I get a little embarrassed about being human. I like to be around animals and think about them and their freedom.” For her Madison appearance, Tagaq will perform with frequent collaborators violinist Jesse Zubot and percussionist Jean Martin. The trio will be improvising a live soundtrack to the 1922 silent film classic, Nanook of the North, commis-
sioned in 2012 by the Toronto International Film Festival. In an interview with the CBC, Tagaq called Nanook a product of its time, noting it contained “a bunch of bullshit happy Eskimo stereotypes.” She says the improvisation project, composed by Derek Charke, is a way to reclaim images of her homeland. No two performances are alike, she adds. “We are lucky because we magically seem to be speaking the same language,” says Tagaq of her collaborators. “We open up musically to ground that hasn’t been covered before.” While continuing to expand musical boundaries, Tagaq is gaining recognition. Animism won the Juno Award for Aboriginal Album of the Year, and it also received the Polaris Prize, the top Canadian music award. Her touring schedule is nonstop; since July, she has performed at Bonnaroo, Toronto, Helsinki, Dublin, Chicago, New York and Iceland. She often brings her children, ages 3 and 12, with her on tour. Like other bold experimenters, such as Yoko Ono or Björk, Tagaq is not trying to please everyone. She says she prefers theaters and ticketed shows to festivals because she’s less worried about “freaking people out.” But she also doesn’t mind if audience members leave her shows. “I don’t want to share with people that don’t want to take it in,” she says. “It’s very intimate. It’s myself. I don’t want people that don’t enjoy it to be present. I feel safer when the people that don’t like it leave.” “I don’t know why anyone would think everyone should like them,” says Tagaq. “I’m just happy and surprised when people like it.” n
Erika Koivunen continued from 23
1021 Spaight Street, Madison
Food Drive for Dane County Food Pantries Tickets: Adult $12, Senior $10 Child/Student: $5 or Free with food item Advance Ticket Outlets: Willy Street Co-op East & West Locations
www.maestroproductions.org
H O L I D A 20−22 Y ART FAIR
NOVEMBER
Scrappy birds perched alongside Access Community Health Centers.
taking something that’s rusted and old and giving it a new life in an unexpected way.” Koivunen prefers not to over-analyze the process. She just wants to build stuff, and she has everything she needs on hand to keep doing it forever: “We have machines. We have materials. We have ideas.” n
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go out into the world and talk to people,” she says. It seems to be working. Word of mouth keeps her busy with commissioned projects most of the time. In between, she just keeps building stuff at Acme Ironworks, the delightfully cluttered shop off South Park Street she shares with her husband, master blacksmith Aaron Howard. It helps that the materials she works with are cheap, often free. People leave buckets of unwanted metal objects at the workshop. Budget Bicycle calls her when they have a bunch of old chains and other parts to get rid of. It also helps to have admirers in the local business community willing to champion her work. One of those fans is Finn Berge, co-owner of the local wine/coffee chain Barriques. When he wanted somebody to design and build the enormous railing at the West
Washington store, he was unimpressed by what the established welding companies had to offer. “I was up in our mezzanine area during our construction period, and I just called Erika on a lark,” says Berge. “She said she could come up right now, and so she showed up covered with welding dust and a baseball hat on backwards on a small girl’s BMX bike.” Since creating the railing, Koivunen has built something for each of the six Barriques locations, from small accent pieces to a large work hanging on the wall of the Monroe Street store that represents her interpretation of the coffee family tree. Koivunen also has a champion in Lynn Lee, a fellow artist who is president of the Marquette Neighborhood Association and co-owner of Cargo Coffee and Ground Zero. Lee is on a mission to flood the east-side neighborhood with Koivunen’s work. Most recently, he spearheaded the effort to commission one of her sculptures for Willy St. Park at the corner of Williamson and Brearly. “There’s this whole reusing of old materials that I love,” Lee says. “It’s whimsical. Often it’s
Saturday, Nov. 21 at 7pm Sunday, Nov. 22 at 3pm Immanuel Lutheran Church
Admission $6 Children under 12 Free
n ART
featuring
Madison Area Community Chorus Ringing Badgers Handbell Ensemble Maestro Brass and more!
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