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Split tooth book review7/7/2023 ![]() “Eat your morals / eat your thoughts / your sinew / your pith / peel off your skin”. Opening the album with ‘In Me’, Tagaq snarls and growls and spits a daunting invocation based on passages from her 2018 book Split Tooth. ![]() ![]() In their place now exists only burning rage and a full-blast attack against oppressors. Gone are the remaining trances of enchanting singsong and polite pleas for understanding. Yet not even the impassioned EP Toothsayer – an accompaniment to the ‘Polar World’ exhibit presented at the National Maritime Museum in London in September 2018 – could have hinted at the sheer ferocity that fuels this new album, Tongues. This crescendo of emotions has been unfurling in Tagaq’s life within and outside music for the past decade. But as is always the case with overlooked pain, it soon turned into frustration, then anger. ![]() ![]() Early solo albums Sinaa and Auk/Blood and collaborations with the Kronos Quartet surfaced these concerns in solemn swirls of avant-folk that invited empathy for the struggles of the Inuit. The Inuit culture and harsh natural and social realities of her homeland not only helped shape her distinct throat singing and musical style, but also stirred an activist undercurrent in her works. The art of Inuk singer and multidisciplinary artist Tanya Tagaq has always been inseparable from her heritage and origins in Nunavut, Canada’s northernmost territory. ![]()
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