Alexander Varty
Lulu Performing Arts
Listen closely and you can hear the ocean: a deep, thrumming pulse that evokes the surf breaking on the long beaches of Meares Island or the Esowista Peninsula. And is that birdsong? Perhaps the call of a varied thrush or a wandering glaucous-winged gull? Perhaps, but it’s hard to tell, what with the wind in the distance and the calm voice of a young woman singing in a language few of us understand—and making perfect sense.
The music that Tsimka Martin and Michael Red will bring to the Phoenix Auditorium on Friday (September 20), in the inaugural concert of the Lulu Performing Arts Society’s 2024-25 season, incorporates all of the above things and more. With Tsimka, a member of the Tla-o-qui-aht First Nation, leading the way, it is inextricably linked to her West Coast homeland, and yet it also exists in an imaginative space that draws on recent advances in computer-based musical technology. Those birds and waves and winds that you hear have been lovingly extracted from the wild and transformed by Red’s digital sampling and processing; further layers are added by Tsimka’s own electronic devices, alongside her field recordings of Tla-o-qui-aht elders and poems gifted by friends.
The blend is undeniably beautiful, even soothing, but beneath its gentle surface lie serious purpose and powerful currents. There’s that mix of the ancient and modern, of course, amplified by the meeting of Red’s East Coast settler heritage and Tsimka’s Indigenous roots. There’s their shared intent of bringing the natural world into their music, not just as a sound effect but as a collaborator, free to set the parameters of a song, whether that be mood or rhythm. And perhaps most importantly, there’s the foregrounding of the Nuučaan̓uɫ language, now spoken by only a handful of the approximately 1200 members of Tsimka’s nation.
Getting that language out into the world is an act of reclaiming sovereignty, she says. And getting it out in the form of very modern-sounding electroacoustic music reinforces the message that the Tla-o-qui-aht are a vital, modern cultural force.
Using Nuučaan̓uɫ, she continues, is “an important reflection of the biodiversity of the world—and that many Indigenous languages are being lost.”
If we’re lucky, we might get to hear Tsimka’s latest Nuučaan̓uɫ composition at the Phoenix. “Just yesterday,” she says, “I went y̓am̓a [salal] berry picking with a couple of people from the community here, and when we started berry-picking t̓aat̓uusaqsa, this elder who was with us, asked me ‘Oh, did you pray already?’ I hadn’t even thought about it, but you’re supposed to ask the land if you can come and pick the berries, and give respect and honour.
“It’s a pretty good example of how our ancestors would do things,” she adds. “And it just tickled me the right way, so I wrote a y̓am̓a-picking song in a little bit more of a traditional style—and in that song there’s a spot for her to say that prayer.”
Salal and synthesizers: it just does not get much more West Coast than that.
Lulu Performing Arts presents Tsimka and Michael Red at the Phoenix Auditorium on Friday (September 20).
For more information and tickets, visit www.luluperformingarts.ca
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