Tanya Tagaq sings with the voice of Gaia. She is an Inuit throat singer and much more with award-winning albums, including the recently released Animism. Her music isn’t sweet or pretty by mainstream musical standards. Her Gaia isn’t the tall, blonde, lithe, blossom-crowned Gaia that so often is the way Earth is depicted, but the powerful, strong, non-human Earth of blizzards, tsunamis, and earthquakes, and also the immense abundant force that has given and supported life on her skin for millions of years and is now being devastated by only one species, our own.
Tanya’s compositions are a fusion of traditional throat-singing and modern electronic music with some non-throat singing but lots of sounds – shrieks, moans, howls, and more – that come from the depths of the human body as it reveals and represents the life force of Gaia, her animals, and her environment. Some commentators call Tanya’s music “scary,” but that only reveals how frightening it can be to truly face both the force and the love of the Earth and the truth of what is happening to the Earth. Many others comment that Tanya’s music brings up in them profound depths of emotions and so it does.
Tanya Tagaq is 39 and an immensely gifted composer, performer, and graphic artist. She has won a number of awards in Canada for her work, including the Polaris Prize for album in the year in 2014. She is well-known for collaborations with Bjork and the Kronos Quartet. She uses her voice not only for singing, but for political activism on behalf of the Inuit people, including the murder of Inuit women and the importance of seal-hunting to Inuit culture. Here is a youtube video of some of her work.
Goddess in a Teapot 