TAGAQ Auk/Blood (Jericho Beach) Rating: NNN
Debut Sinaa served as a vehicle for her astonishingly primal vocals alone, but Inuit throat singer Tanya Tagaq sets about probing everything from free jazz to hip-?hop on this follow-?up.
Violinist Jesse Zubot’s exploratory strings draw circles around her trademark grunts, buzzes, moans and gasps, lending a backbone to this eerily compelling collection, while Buck 65’s rapping and electronic instrumentation (on Gentle and Want) enjoy an incongruously contemporary place in Auk/Blood’s overall spine-?tingling histrionics.
It’s a collaborative effort that pays dividends but makes Auk/Blood all the more difficult to pigeonhole: World music? Electronic fusion? Tagaq’s once again created something that throbs with life no matter how difficult to classify.
