Tanya Tagaq Live - Exotic Folk Tradition Spiced With The Avant-Garde

Inuit throat singer Tanya Tagaq's live performance in Kumu served to prove two. First, exotic type of folk music and avant-garde experimentalism can be amazingly compatible. Second, that the power of music lies beyond convenient labeling.

The avant-garde composers and performers have always looked towards the folk traditions to create, in a seemingly ironic way, something new and exciting. For example, minimalist composers have often adapted the principles of Eastern music for their own conceptions. Avant-garde vocalists have often used their voice as an instrument rather than a tool to convey message. Tagaq's throat singing technique proved that voice-as-an-instrument approach stretches back to the legacy of archaic folk music.

Also, the entire concert was based on improvisation between Tagaq and Michael Red (electronics) and Kenton Loewen (drums). Improv and avant-garde have often gone hand in hand. Then again, folk music can also rely on improvisation very well. In short, the merger of folk tradition and the avant-garde seemed logical and natural in Tanya Tagaq's performance.

Even though according to the presskit Tagaq was said to blend the northern aborigenes throat singing with the indie-rock, such labelling seems misleading. Not only that the indie as such is a rather vague stylistic term by nature, but also because there actually were no elements in the performed music that one could associate with indie rock as an idiom understood in a certain way.

Rather, Michael Red's walls of sounds referred to the manifestations of the more cerebral kind of electronica (musique concrete, ambient, glitch, IDM) and Loewen's drumming spectre encompassed Jaki Liebezeit's hypno-grooving, Tony Williams' free-jazz touch as well as Chris Cutler's sonic conceptions (he used a violin bow on a cymbal, for instance).

Therefore, the power of music does not depend on stylistic frontiers or labels. However, it is found in sounds. And also performance, which was fantastic. Even if during the quieter parts Red and Loewen's accompaniment may have seemed a bit random, Tagaq still held attention with her impressive vocal technique.

The more intense parts however sounded almost danceable and hypnotic and in Tagaq's body movement on stage there was some sexual animistic suggestiveness.

For the "encore", they improvised again: it began with a melodic singing which proved that Tagaq can also sing quite beautifully without special tricks and it culminated with an interplay built on an even dancier rhythm. In summary, it was an exciting, new kind of concert music.