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Tanya Tagaq

From Canada

Adventurous throat singer from the far north

"Calling Tanya Tagaq an Inuit throat singer is like calling Yo-Yo Ma a cello player. Sure, it's accurate, but it's not the whole of what he does." When the arts correspondent of Canada's National Post tapped these words into his Mac, he neatly summed up the problem in trying to contain Tanya Tagaq's music with mere words. Not that this extraordinary singer from the country's northernmost reaches uses mere words herself. With her elastic, otherworldly voice drawing from an extraordinary palette of sound, she's won the admiration of many peers, among them the Kronos Quartet, our old beatboxing chum Shlomo and some lass called Bjork who likened Tanya's "total emotional" music to that of the equally committed Edith Piaf. Deeply rhythmic and entrancing, it certainly summons plenty of contradictory adjectives - guttural yet angelic, haunting yet alluring. And, most recently collaborating with Faith No More's Mike Patton and rapper Buck 65, it's a voice that goes just wherever the hell it wants.
(Biography by Nige Tassell 2010)
(Image by Nadya Kwandibens)

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