Piqsiq's atmospheric throat-singing style grows out of a close sisterly bond
Using live looping, the Inuit local duo blends the ancient and new
Piqsiq mixes the traditions of Inuit throat-singing with looping and beats for a sound that’s at once ancient and coolly contemporary.
The Chan Centre for the Performing Arts presents Piqsiq on October 16 at 7 pm via its Dot Com Series. Tickets range from $0 to $20, or via subscriptions to the full series
BREATHING ON each other: it’s a forbidden act in these masked, pandemic times. But with traditional Inuit throat-singing--the ancient game of katajjaq--two female performers go further, facing each other inches apart, feeding and riffing off one another’s rhythmic exhalations and inhalations.
The bond is especially intimate when those two people are sisters, as is the case with the artists in the Vancouver-area based duo Piqsiq.
“We’ve always had a taboo art!” laughs Inuksuk Mackay in a lively and candid conference call with her sibling Tiffany Ayalik. “The government called it taboo way back when.”
She’s referring to the fact that, when Christian clergy arrived in the Arctic, they banned throat-singing for decades.
“It’s interesting because you are almost sharing breath--and I eat a lot of garlic, so I feel like that’s bad for Inuksuk sometimes,” Ayalik says with a laugh, but then turns serious: ”You are in close proximity, and I feel like there's a lot of misunderstanding when women are close to each other: people can exotify or sexualize that. That’s a bit of the puritanical hangover.
“Inuit culture is so not like that,” she continues. “We’re so blunt and open in terms of sharing space.
“So yes, it’s been a taboo for a long time for a lot of reasons. Like, ‘What are these strange, guttural, satanic things coming from your mouth?’”
The sisters grew up throar-singing with each other but the art form took on new, political resonance for them as they got older.
The sisters grew up throat-singing, one-upping each other and competing with their cousins. With roots in Nunavut’s Kitikmeot and Kivalliq Regions, they were raised in Yellowknife. But as they entered adulthood, what had been a fun pastime in childhood started to take on political resonance.
“As we got older we started to understand the impact of colonization and how much cultural loss there had been. We started to seek out teachers who could impart knowledge,” explains Mackay.
Since then, the sisters have taken that sound and made it uniquely their own, performing with improvisational live looping, sometimes adding beats. The effect is at once ethereal and haunting, urban and Arctic. They broke new aural ground with their debut album Altering the Timeline, and will give their sound high-tech new resonance in the Chan Centre for the Performing Arts’ streamed recording this week. (See the sneak-peek video from the Chan below for an exhilarating idea of what they can do.)
“Throat-singing is our daily connection to the land, and we try to be authentic to that practice but also to ourselves as Inuit in 2020 who live in BC,” explains Ayalik. “It’s taking that form and making it alive and dynamic in a way that resonates.
“It’s authentic to us being who we are and a blend of the ancient and the futuristic,” she continues. “It’s not to be dogmatic about what is or isn't throat singing. It’s a way for us to literally breathe life into a form--with a great respect for the old and the ancient, and doing our best to learn the proper ways of doing things.”
Key to developing their art has been the sisters’ bond--a close tie that has been broken and rebuilt over the years. Mackay hints at the conflict between them growing up by saying, “The adults in our lives very much pitted us against one another. But we’ve been able to navigate that without any guidance. Such powerful experiences help us anticipate each other in knowing and accepting the differences in our being. You can complement even if you're doing something different.”
“We’ve been through really beautiful things, and really hard things,” reflects Ayalik. “We’ve been through really big fights--what most people would think of as relationship-ending fights. We’ve done our best to repair and strengthen our relationship and to communicate clearly.
“Working through the conflict is a way we were able to build incredible empathy for what the other person is going through,” she adds. “I'm really proud of the bond we've been able to have between us….I feel like that intimacy and meeting of minds really shows up in how we perform--that love and bond can't help but show.”
What the sisters have developed out of this is a musical improvisational style in which they’re able to anticipate each other on an intuitive level; Mackay describes being able to read even the “smallest micro-movements” in her sister as they throat-sing.
“Sometimes the phrase I use is ‘We’re two sides of the same coin,’” she says. “We’ve had so many of the same experiences in the same way with a different outcome. I feel like we temper and fuel each other at the same time.
“Another image would be roots and branches: sometimes one of us is more grounded and in the earth, and the other is the branches reaching the sun and light.”
That plays out in a sound that often shifts between darkness and light. The sisters say that’s inevitable, considering their shared experiences of the North’s extremes of near-24-hour sun during summer and near-24-hour night in the winter.
Of course, their tight bond has been challenged by pandemic isolation. They spent almost two-and-a-half months apart during the spring’s lockdown. “Definitely, it was a huge relief when we were able to expand our bubble,” says Ayalik.
They’ve also had to adjust their performance style to the digital realm, as they will at the Chan. They say they’ve created a playlist that allows them to tell a sort of story with their songs. It’s a marked departure for performers who are used to drawing impulses and improvisation from the vibe in the audience.
“It shifts the performance to us bringing our own energy to it,” Ayalik observes
“Definitely the intimacy has increased,” her sister adds. If possible, in other words, the sisters are drawing even closer than before.
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