Inuit Art Quarterly (IAQ): Tell me about your new album, Legends. I’ve been listening to it non-stop lately, and it’s an album where I didn’t feel the urge to shuffle the tracks. What was behind that approach?
Tiffany Kuliktana Ayalik (TKA): Thank you, album gods. This is our first time getting a vinyl pressing done of any of our music, and everything just worked out perfectly. We had ten tracks; the first five on the A side where we start on the land, where all of the characters and all of the songs are about land-based mythological creatures; and then the B side is all the ocean-based creatures.
IAQ: It sounds like a lot of thought went into it. Was this the most planned-out album you’ve worked on?
Inuksuk Mackay (IM): I feel like we're a weird combination of organized chaos. Because we perform improvisationally, I think that there's a very important creative element that's central to who we are as a band, to act on impulse. This is one of the first projects where we kind of planned the chaos. There was lots of planning that went in ahead of time, but then in the moment we gave ourselves permission to interpret the stories in a way that was very personal to each of us and collectively. There was lots of tech talk and arrangement ahead of time, but then once we were in the studio, we played images from Inuit artists of the different creatures. That mixed with the stories we'd heard and how we visualized these things in our heads, and then we just responded that way. So what you hear on the album is largely improvised. And we went back in a few times and said, “Oh, let's add a shimmer here,” or whatever. It's a bit of both worlds.
IAQ: I love the idea of organized chaos. Could you tell me more about the album for those who may be unfamiliar with it?
TKA: We’ve been working on this album for a few years now. It’s definitely our largest album ever. We always knew we wanted to do something where each track was inspired by a different mythological creature, where each song would be a three-to-five-minute film version of the creature’s story. A lot of the feedback we’ve gotten from our live performances echoes along the same lines—people tell us it’s super cinematic and how it feels like a journey. And I was getting all of these images while I was sitting and listening.
IM: One of the things that I was really hoping people might catch is that it's mythology, but we called the album Legends. For any language nerds, there's quite a distinction between what a legend is and what mythology is. Yes, it's about the creature. But when I was a kid, and I was hearing about Mahaha chasing kids around and he's kind of not that intelligent, and you could always outsmart him, it made me feel very confident that if I ever saw Mahaha I would outsmart him. I was always imagining myself and my peers in these roles. It's from the perspective of the survivor, because the stories are always of the people who survived. These people are legends, right? So that led to us calling it Legends. I wanted the focus to be on the people who are in the story.
IAQ: Can you talk about crafting the musical and visual storytelling element of the album?
TKA: We wanted to create the this framework [of the album] and to then improvise within it. We talked with some of our Elders and our family about traditional stories, and there's the super popular ones that everybody knows, like those ones that are just like in the top rotation in storytelling. And then we also wanted to delve into the ones that are a little bit more obscure and lesser known because they're not any less interesting or fascinating or exciting. We decided ahead of time who the key characters would be.
IM: I was definitely the kid in school that was always looking for a way to make the project into a diorama. So I did some clay and resin pieces with scenes from my imagination of how these things would play out for the stories. It was part of the plan in my head from the beginning of conceiving the album. The pieces are 3-dimensional and there’s a lot of different ways to look at them. We have been talking to Elders and looking at how some of the stories came about and the role that they play in Inuit culture. The white knight hero, the savior and the evil villain character archetypes are just not a thing in the traditional ways of telling these stories. A lot of things in the stories can be interpreted in different ways. Nuance is required. The art pieces sit on a rotating, spinning mechanism, so depending on what part of the piece you’re looking at, you’re going to have a different experience.
IAQ: It kind of reminds me of storytelling, like how different people might tell the same story in a different way or from a different perspective.
TKA: Totally. Deepening this experience, what’s happening on some of our socials is this kind of inter-regional conversation. When we’re posting singles or making posts about the different characters, people in Alaska are like, “That character sounds like this one in our stories!” Or there’ll be this whole other story and then someone from Kalaallit Nunaat (Greenland) will say, “This is how we say it in Greenland and this is our story.” There’s this really fascinating exchange to see which of these characters has travelled across the Arctic. It’s a ripple effect promoting storytelling cross-regionally.
IAQ: Can you talk more about the sound and how you created this immersive experience? Is it different from what you’ve done in the past?
TKA: We did our album launch in Vancouver, BC, at Lobe Studio, one of only two venues in the world that has completely 360-degree sonic capacity. So there’s speakers all in the walls, in the ceiling and the floor. Our producer and engineer took every single track, every single sound, and spread them out over all the speakers, and then they moved between them. Not only are you hearing the song in full surround sound, you’re hearing a certain little creature make a noise that travels from behind you, or a super subsonic, deep rumbling noise for Nanurluk that just really highlights the size of Nanurluk. It was a really amazing way to feel that album, even for us who created it. It was like nothing we've ever done before.
IM: I would say it's more involved [than our other albums], but weirdly, I'd say that this album has more of the feeling you would get in a live show. We've really struggled to recreate what we do in live performances in a studio environment, until this album. Improv is such a huge part of our creative process, but in the studio it just dies. I would imagine it to be the equivalent of writer's block, where you're staring at the screen. There's no audience, there's no energy. It just feels very mechanical. That's why we brought our pedal into the studio. We set it up so that our mic travelled to the booth separately. The pedal travelled to the booth separately. So there was a reference track for how we built it, but there was a clean feed where [our sound engineer] could layer our clean tracks, and then we've got the mood lighting turned down. We had the images playing on the big screen, and we really tried to bring that live electric “see where it goes” element into the studio.
From: https://www.inuitartfoundation.org/inuit-art-quarterly/iaq-online/piqsiq-s-new-album-music-and-storytelling
