Manitoba Live Music Event

Tanya Tagaq Album Release

Date
Saturday, Mar 18, 2017, 8pm - 11pm
Performers
Tanya Tagaq
Becky Han
Location
West End Cultural Centre
Address
586 Ellice Avenue, Winnipeg, MB, Canada

About

The West End Cultural Centre presents Tanya Tagaq 'Retribution' Album Release at West End Cultural Centre with special guest Becky Han.

Tanya Tagaq's music is like nothing you've heard before. The Arctic-born artist is an improvisational performer, avant-garde composer and experimental recording artist who won the 2014 Polaris Music Prize for an album called Animism, a work that disrupted the music world in Canada and beyond with its powerfully original vision. Tagaq contorts elements of punk, metal, and electronica into a complex and contemporary sound that begins in breath, a communal and fundamental phenomenon. 
Tagaq follows up Animism with Retribution (out 10/21), an even more musically aggressive, more aggressively political, more challenging, more spine tingling, more powerful masterpiece. Retribution is Tanya Tagaq's portrait of a violent world in crisis, hovering on the brink of destruction. It's a complex, exhilarating, howling protest that links lack of respect for women's rights to lack of respect for the planet, to lack of respect for Indigenous rights. It's an album about celebrating the great strength of women, it's about rejecting the toxic, militaristic masculinity that's taken over the world since the rise of Western industrial capitalism, and is rapidly destroying human life support systems through climate change and pollution. In a startling lyric from the title track, she observes, "Money has spent us." 

Tanya Tagaq's music and performances challenge static ideas of genre and culture, and contend with themes of environmentalism, human rights and post-colonial issues. In repeated interviews, Tagaq has stressed the importance of considering her work in the context of contemporary – not traditional – art. This statement is not just about sound, although her music is decidedly modern and technically intricate, but about deep-rooted assumptions about indigenous culture in general.

While 2014's Polaris Music Prize win signaled an awakening to Tanya Tagaq's art and messages, she has been touring and collaborating with an elite international circle of artists for over a decade. Tagaq's improvisational approach lends itself to collaboration across genres, and recent projects have pulled her in vastly different directions, from contributing guest vocals to a recent Fucked Up song to premiering a new composition made for Kronos Quartet's Fifty for the Future collection.

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