Photo credit: Rebecca Wood.

“Tagaq’s surreal meld of poetry and prose transmutes the Arctic’s boundless beauty, intensity, and desolation into a wrenching contemporary mythology.” – New Yorker

“Tagaq’s emotional intelligence is aspirational.” – Anupa Mistry, Globe and Mail

“An Inuk throat singer who’s got a fluidity in her rasp and a wail that reflects like crystal.” – Stereogum

For those unable to experience experimental Inuk artist Tanya Tagaq’s sonic contribution to National Maritime Museum’s “Polar Worlds” exhibit in situ in London, UK, Tagaq announces the work will be released as a digital EP titled Toothsayer via Six Shooter Records. Toothsayer, a 5-track soundscape created for the exhibit, expands Tagaq’s compositional work with ambient electronic and piano-driven textures.

With ecological precision and a crypto-travelogue narrative, Toothsayer features Tagaq working with long-time percussionist Jean Martin, who produced the EP. UK experimental electronic artist Ash Koosha, who met Tagaq for the first time when the artists were invited to work together for a BBC Late Junction session in 2017, also performs on “Snowblind” and “Submerged.”

“Snowblind,” the first song shared from the collection, expresses the sensory experience of snowblindness, a condition that can produce colourful pulsating shapes amidst darkness. The contrast of brightness and darkness, a recurring theme in Tagaq’s work, is at once environmental, physical, emotional and political. “I named this Toothsayer because I always liked the term soothsayer, to look into the future and to speak wisely,” says Tagaq of the title. “Teeth represent protection and hunting in nature. We are going to have to get our fists up and our teeth out to carve our way to survival in this world.”

Organized as a categorical assessment of the different and extreme elements of the Nunavut winter, where “it’s so easy to succumb to death in the north purely by the elements, including the socio and political elements,” the EP also connects in title and theme with Split Tooth, Tagaq’s debut novel. The book, a powerfully permeative mythobiography about a girl growing up in Nunavut in the 1970s, was released in September 2018 and immediately found a place on the Giller Prize Long List, Canada’s top fiction prize. The work also appeared on year end Best Of lists including NPR, Globe and Mail, CBC, Toronto Star and more. Apple Music named the work Canada’s Best Canadian Audiobook; narrated by Tagaq with improvised vocal elements, Split Tooth’s fact-fiction- dreamscapes come alive in this spoken word form, which moves between silky hypnotic poetry and carotid-ripping song. Toothsayer travels a similar path to Split Tooth through poles of exquisite delicacy, frenzy and fury.

Toothsayer will be released March 1, 2019, on Six Shooter Records.

STREAM "SNOWBLIND" HERE.