There's so much wrong with the title of this video that we very nearly didn't post it. First of all, this isn't a "TED talk," unless you can call something a "talk" that doesn't have even one single spoken or sung word. Doesn't a "talk" consist of words? This isn't a "talk," it's a performance at a TED conference.
And then there's nothing even remotely "punk" about it. On the one hand, at the heart of "punk" is a sort of DIY ethos - "you can do this, too" - as apart from polished professionalism and virtuoso performance. Tagaq has obviously spent years training and rehearsing this type of performance and plays her larynx like a Stradivarius instrument - the very opposite of punk. I think "punk" is the term the TED organizers use for anything don't understand, anything that sounds different from Katy Perry or Keith Urban.
So it's not a TED talk and it's not punk, and in our humble opinion, Tagaq is not a throat singer, at least in the aspect that while she occasionally dips her toe into producing multiple notes simultaneously and allowing the overtones to emerge, it's only a small part of her style and she's performing in a tradition quite separate from Mongolian (Tuvan) throat singing. It's more like live phasing and almost sounds more like some of Steve Reich's early tape recorder experiments (Come Out) than traditional throat singing.
She is of Inuit heritage and her performance does make use of Inuit traditions, so that's the one and only thing that the title has correct.
Here's another TED talk performance, in case you want to hear what Tuvan throat singing actually sounds like. It's pretty astonishing.
If the sounds of Alash seem somehow "unworldly" to you, think of that as an indication of how you perceive "the world." This is traditional Mongolian music (okay, the beatboxer is a Western innovation), and sounds as natural, as "worldly" to Mongolian ears as a Tennessee fiddle or a folk song might to us.
What interests us is that several people have told us that Tagaq's singing sounds to them like demonic possession. Metal singers, no strangers to Satanic symbolism themselves, have used throat singing, or a facsimile of throat singing, in their music for years. Why do these growls and guttural noises sound to us like Satanism?
Our theory is that a tradition of throat singing existed in early medieval times among the non-Christianized tribes and indigenous peoples on northern Germany and far-northern Europe, those "pagan" tribes surrounding the Baltic Sea. The tradition continues in the Sammi, Mongol, indigenous Greenland, and Faroese traditions, where it survived the ages relatively unchanged. The Vikings were a part of this tradition, as well as the Vandals, Goths and Visigoths and Metagoths (sure, why not?). The Latin Christians of southern Europe, the peoples surrounding the Mediterranean Sea, feared and hated the Baltic tribes, largely because the Baltics would famously descend upon and kill, rape and pillage the Mediterraneans (not cool). The non-Latin traditions of the pagans were denigrated and despised by the Christians, who came to associate the Baltic culture with Satanism, evil, and other dark forces. From there, homeopathic herbal medicine became "witchcraft" and Baltic dance and performance became "possession." The word berserk comes from the Germanic word for bear suit - the Pagans would wear bear claws and a bear head in a ceremony recreating a hunt, and the one impersonating the bear was said to be "berserk." And finally, Baltic vocal traditions, including throat singing and guttural growls, was deemed to be "satanic" and evidence of demonic possession. Throat singing has been described pejoratively by Latin writers, who compared the sound to "howling dogs."
But it was all in the mental models, the schema (samskara), of the Christians.
Which brings us to the experimental folk band Heilung. With members from Denmark, Norway, and Germany, Heilung's music is based on texts and original artifacts from the Iron and the Viking Ages. They describe their music as an "amplified history from early medieval northern Europe." Heilung means "healing" in German, emphasizing the positive aspect of so-called "witchcraft."
Using traditional vocal techniques and extremely traditional instruments that may have been accessible to the proto-Vikings and other Baltic tribes (bones, antlers, animal skin drums), plus some theatrical costume, makeup and modern amplification, Heilung recreate what music might have sounded like in Scandinavia before the missionaries arrived and the global expansion of the Holy Roman Empire. Heilung do incorporate a non-traditional, English-language "rap," but the words are based on descriptions of Viking poetic styles. No surviving examples of these styles exist today outside of a few scant snippets in the Poetic and Prose Edda.
The low growling, the hissing, and the forked fingers are all based on descriptions of Seiðr magic. That imagery morphed into medieval interpretation of "witches," whom the Christians deeply feared, but were in fact real people practicing an indigenous artform. The tradition become an abstracted meme of its own that evolved and mutated into the 21st century in a variety of pop culture idioms, particularly death metal.
If historical events had occurred slightly differently, or as butterfly-wing theory would have it, if one medieval battle had gone slightly differently, if even one warrior had bested the other instead of falling and thus turn the tide of that particular skirmish, the music of Heilung, Alash and Tagaq would be our familiar "classical" music or at least our "traditional" folk music, and the so-called "western canon" would be viewed derisively, suspiciously, and derogatorily, and would be considered evil and degenerate.
Also, since we mentioned Steve Reich's 1966 composition, Come Out, earlier, here it is:
According to various on-line explanations, Heilung's music is neither purely Viking nor explicitly Neolithic. To be specific, it's from the proto-Germanic, pre-migration period, or 600 years before the Vikings (1st Century CE to 550, when the Elder Futhark alphabet gave way to the Younger Futhark). It's based on linguistic reconstruction and snippets of historical texts found in the writings of Tacitus and Saxo Grammaticus, some of which were carved in runes on bone fragments.
Using traditional vocal techniques and extremely traditional instruments that may have been accessible to the proto-Vikings and other Baltic tribes (bones, antlers, animal skin drums), plus some theatrical costume, makeup and modern amplification, Heilung recreate what music might have sounded like in Scandinavia before the missionaries arrived and the global expansion of the Holy Roman Empire. Heilung do incorporate a non-traditional, English-language "rap," but the words are based on descriptions of Viking poetic styles. No surviving examples of these styles exist today outside of a few scant snippets in the Poetic and Prose Edda.
The low growling, the hissing, and the forked fingers are all based on descriptions of Seiðr magic. That imagery morphed into medieval interpretation of "witches," whom the Christians deeply feared, but were in fact real people practicing an indigenous artform. The tradition become an abstracted meme of its own that evolved and mutated into the 21st century in a variety of pop culture idioms, particularly death metal.
If historical events had occurred slightly differently, or as butterfly-wing theory would have it, if one medieval battle had gone slightly differently, if even one warrior had bested the other instead of falling and thus turn the tide of that particular skirmish, the music of Heilung, Alash and Tagaq would be our familiar "classical" music or at least our "traditional" folk music, and the so-called "western canon" would be viewed derisively, suspiciously, and derogatorily, and would be considered evil and degenerate.
Also, since we mentioned Steve Reich's 1966 composition, Come Out, earlier, here it is:
Finally, since it's become something of a meme/theme on this blog lately, we feel compelled to point out that none of the performers in this post will be performing this year at Big Ears.
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