NUNAVUT ARTIST TERRY UYARAK SHARES “ANIQSAATUINNARIT” FROM UPCOMING LP

WATCH AND SHARE “ANIQSAATUINNARIT” FT. BECKY HAN HERE

BUY / STREAM “ANIQSAATUINNARIT” FT. BECKY HAN HERE

NEW LP,  NUNARJUA ISULINGINNIANI (BEFORE THE WORLD ENDS), OUT OCTOBER 30, 2020 VIA AAKULUK MUSIC 

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Nunarjua Isulinginniani Artwork // DOWNLOAD HIGH-RES

Today, Terry Uyarak is sharing “Aniqsaatuinnarit” featuring fellow Nunavut artist Becky Han from his upcoming debut solo album, Nunarjua Isulinginniani, out October 30, 2020 via Aakuluk Music

“I wrote this song with my wife Tanya when we went through a tough time telling each other a line each how to keep our heads up during a dark time when we had 24 hour sun,” says Uyarak. “I remember also my father telling me a quote saying ‘iminnik sannatituinaqtu’ (he/she is designing their own future other good or bad), I’ve been wanting to write motivational words for anyone going through a tough time, that we let time pass without reaction, life gets easier.”

On the single, Becky Han says, “I feel like every single human being has told themselves at least once in their lifetime to ‘just breathe’ (aniqsaatuinnarit). Terry and his wife Tanya beautifully turned this feeling into this beautiful song. For us to relate to and to heal from.”

The accompanying lyric video further explores these themes with archival footage of dog sledding expeditions from the National Film Board. 

WATCH AND SHARE “ANIQSAATUINNARIT” FT. BECKY HAN HERE

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Produced by Jace Lasek (Besnard Lakes, Patrick Watson, Land Of Talk), the album’s title,  Nunarjua Isulinginniani, translated to English means ‘Before The World Ends’. The album itself carefully weaves together storytelling, soundscape and song to carry each listener on a journey, by dog team, to the ends of the word. 

Uyarak is a self-taught singer/songwriter and musician from Igloolik, a small and vibrant Inuit community located north of the Arctic circle between the Canadian mainland and Baffin Island in Nunavut. Igloolik is one of those special places in the Canadian Arctic, where Inuit language and culture are still strongly embedded into everyday life, and there’s a strong sense of community within. 

WATCH AND SHARE “ANURI” (FT. RIIT) HERE

BUY / STREAM “ANURI” (FT. RIIT) HERE

Terry is no stranger to the tight knit Nunavut music scene; for over a decade he performed as an actor, juggler, and musician, and toured around the globe with the only Inuit circus troupe in the world, ARTCIRQ. Most recently, Terry took part in the creation of and performed in a major multidisciplinary production, Unikkaaqtuaq, that toured across Canada in 2019. This kinship and involvement has led to some stellar collaborations, as the album also features prominent Nunavut artists like Riit, Celina Kalluk, and Becky Han. 

WATCH AND SHARE “INUIT NUNANGAT” HERE

BUY / STREAM “INUIT NUNANGAT” HERE

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Becky Han

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Photo Credit : Jennifer Lane // DOWNLOAD HIGH-RES

NUNARJUA ISULINGINNIANI TRACKLIST
01 Intro
02 Nunarjua Isulinginniani
03 Anuri (ft. Riit)
04 Interlude 1
05 Aniqsaatuinnarit
06 Interlude 2
07 Aniuvalik
08 Interlude 3
09 Uvaguk
10 Interlude 4
11 Tasiunnga
12 Inuugannuk
13 Interlude 5
14 Igloolik

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ABOUT AAKULUK MUSIC
The mission of Aakuluk Music is to help Nunavut musicians produce and promote their music. The label will help record, market, and distribute Inuktitut music nationally and internationally now, and for future generations of Inuit musicians. Aakuluk Music seeks to build hope through music and community, to encourage youth, and contribute to the preservation of the territory’s distinct culture. 

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MIKE EDEL PARTNERS WITH CUMULUS FOR NEW SINGLE

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Photo Credit : Brian Van Wyk // DOWNLOAD HIGH-RES

“Giving Up On Giving In” is the intimate soundtrack of 2020. 'Another day, another morning...' catalogues a constant blur of unforgiving repetition. The only thing Mike Edel is giving up on however - is giving in. A collaboration with Cumulus, the song is the latest single from En Masse which is out November 20 via Pennant.

 “Alex and I met through Chris Walla who released two Cumulus records on Trans, and who produced my last record,” says Edel. “We wrote 'Giving Up On Giving In' about our individual and collective mistakes the day after every Christmas party of 2019. We wrote about the resolve to push past the mental thresholds of waking up in the morning and making music and doing this thing. The song has also gotten a lot more relevant to me through the pandemic.”

BUY / STREAM “GIVING UP ON GIVING IN” HERE

WATCH AND SHARE “GIVING UP ON GIVING IN” HERE

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“Giving Up On Giving In” Single Artwork // DOWNLOAD HIGH-RES

Mixed by Marcus Paquin (Arcade Fire, The National) with additional production by Andy Park (Noah Gundersen, The Head And The Heart), En Masse is an item quest about discovery. The collective instincts, intuition and melody of a cast of collaborators. “The writing, recording and production were guided by the collective instincts, intuition and melody of a cast of collaborators,” says Edel. “With this project I wanted to bring in outside ideas and methods to help me formulate a new energy and because of this, En Masse has expanded my artistic capacities.”

WATCH AND SHARE “GOOD ABOUT EVERYTHING” HERE

BUY / STREAM “GOOD ABOUT EVERYTHING” HERE

The new LP follows up Edel’s Chris Walla (Death Cab For Cutie) produced 2019 record, THRESHOLDS. After THRESHOLDS, 4 million cumulative streams across major platforms, landing a song on ABC’s American Idol, in heavy rotation on CBC Music, AAA Radio across the United States, and on Sirius XM’s The Verge and North Americana; after playing hundreds of shows across North American and Europe including Rifflandia Festival, Vancouver Folk Festival, Regina Folk Festival, Victoria International Jazz Festival, and Upstream Music Festival; after sharing the stage with Serena Ryder, Foy Vance, Said The Whale and Josh Garrels; and after moving to Seattle, WA and getting married, Edel has established himself as a creative tour de force with plenty on the horizon.

WATCH AND SHARE “HELLO UNIVERSE” HERE

BUY / STREAM “HELLO UNIVERSE” HERE

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EN MASSE TRACKLIST
01 Hello Universe
02 Good About Everything
03 Sunshine
04 Lose You
05 Giving Up On Giving In
06 Still Thinking About You
07 Need You
08 Hockey Guy
09 Balcony
10 The Distance

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GORD DOWNIE SHARES TWO VERSIONS OF “ABOUT BLANK” FROM UPCOMING ALBUM AWAY IS MINE 

THE TWO-DISC TWENTY-TRACK SET PRESENTS GORD’S FINAL TEN SONGS IN ELECTRIC AND ACOUSTIC VERSIONS

OUT OCTOBER 16, 2020 VIA ARTS & CRAFTS

LISTEN TO “ABOUT BLANK”

PREORDER AWAY IS MINE NOW

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Away Is Mine Album Artwork // DOWNLOAD HIGH-RES

Gord Downie recently announced the posthumous double album Away Is Mine.

Steered to life by “my oldest Toronto friend,” guitarist and co-writer Josh Finlayson, Downie recorded the album in July 2017 at The Tragically Hip’s studio in Bath, Ontario, mere months before he passed away on October 17th that year. 

His final solo recording, the two-disc set features Downie’s last ten songs, each presented in electric and acoustic versions. 

“This won’t be his last release, but these are the final ten songs Gord sang before he passed away. The last time he ever sang into a mic,” brother Patrick Downie wrote in a statement upon the album’s announcement. The 20-track collection highlights Gord’s poetic mastery at its most bare and personal, with vibrant yet haunting production that casts each song in different otherworldly light. Away Is Mine will be released October 16, 2020 in deluxe limited edition 2LP, 2CD, and digital formats via Arts & Crafts.

PREORDER AWAY IS MINE NOW

After revealing the electric disc’s first two chapters, “Hotel Worth” and “Useless Nights, today sees the release of both versions of “About Blank,a centrepiece of the album that reflects, in either iteration, the duality of darkness and light, weight and weightlessness, at play in the character of Gord’s mind, in the words guiding his pen, at once a reckoning with and a freeing from existence. “I’m in awe of no one / anymore I have none of your fear,” he intones in just one masterful stroke.

“About Blank” embodies – in its most obvious and opulent measures – the spectral sound of Away Is Mine, no doubt owing to the uncanny context of its creation, but because it is so expertly intuited, and projected skyward, by producer Nyles Spencer. The song morphs from a plaintive bluegrass picker into a bizarrely upbeat electro-hoedown in under two-and-a-half minutes, with buzzy synthesizers mingling amidst fiddle trills and country twang before diving into ambient ether. On the loosely coined “acoustic” version, the song’s folksy roots are exposed, but soon belied by Gord’s voice in odd chorus with a pitch-shifted apparition, delighting in the auspicious refrain “Come be surrounded / By those who love you the most.”

LISTEN TO “ABOUT BLANK” & "ABOUT BLANK (ACOUSTIC)"

A characteristically questing and idiosyncratic work that holds fast to its author’s unwavering artistic spirit, Away Is Mine is a contemplation on Gord’s life, written with his deft hand and forever inscrutable sense of humour even as he locked eyes with the Great Inevitability. As autobiographical as it is collaborative, Away Is Mine is a document of an artist disappearing into his art, essentially becoming his art through that process. Here, laid bare, is the process. 

Sessions began on July 17, 2017 with Spencer, the Bathouse’s in-house engineer, at the helm, and came together in a flare of creative energy and live takes over the next four days. Acoustic sketches in “open C” (a remnant tuning from Secret Path songs) that Gord and Josh had knocked together over Garageband that spring became adorned, often in real time, with thoughtful embellishments and lavish space that Spencer – who had proven himself something of a sonic savant on The Tragically Hip’s Man Machine Poem (2016) and Gord’s preceding solo records Secret Path (2016) and Introduce Yerself (2017) – describes as “from another world, from the future, from a place we don’t know.” 

Rounding out the so-called Family Band, another cherished friend and decades-long collaborator Travis Good of The Sadies rode out to Bath to sprinkle in fiddle, mandolin, and guitars, while longtime Bathouse overseer Dave “Billy Ray” Koster and Lou Downie, Gord’s son, contributed live drum parts further spliced by Spencer into the mix. Through judicious use of drum loops, synths, vocal effects and “general madness,” as Finlayson puts it, Spencer transformed Away Is Mine into the supernatural end product at hand.

“They are the same record, just different mixes,” avows Spencer, referring to the ‘electric’ and ‘acoustic’ refractions of Away Is Mine – more convergent sonic pathways than separate ‘plugged’ and ‘unplugged’ monoliths. Finlayson asked for the stripped-back versions after the fact “purely for selfish reasons,” as personal mementos, but their standalone value has since grown clear to all who have heard them. They could be mistaken for two entirely different recordings, and yet they are actually the same – the same lightning, just in different bottles.

READ THE ALBUM LINER ESSAY

Like all of the music and the poetry and the memories and the mad genius Gord gave us during his 53 years on our planet, Away Is Mine is immortal. And yet it took a fearless reckoning with his own mortality to get us here. Despite the grim undercurrent or the “elephant in the room” during the album’s recording, joy is the guiding light of what Gord, together with loved ones, created over four summer days by Lake Ontario: joy in friendships, joy in family, joy in collaboration, joy in writing, joy in music and joy in mystery. Everyone involved in the making of Away Is Mine refers to it as “a gift,” the magic of which has carried through the completion of the album over this summer 2020, including the creation of the original artwork by Clare Downie and Willo Downie, Gord’s daughters.

“We feel so blessed for this opportunity. Simply described as gratitude. Grateful for another gift from Gord. A gift that has been our beautiful companion and an unintended source of solace in the face of life without him,” Josh and Patrick share. “May it lift you up and carry you onwards and upwards always and forever. 

Away Is Mine. Away Is Yers.”

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GORD DOWNIE AWAY IS MINE TRACKLISTING
Disc One:
1. Hotel Worth
2. Useless Nights
3. I Am Lost
4. About Blank
5. River Don’t Care
6. The Least Impossible
7. Traffic Is Magic
8. Away Is Mine
9. No Solace
10. Untitled

Disc Two:
11. Hotel Worth (Acoustic)
12. Useless Nights (Acoustic)
13. I Am Lost (Acoustic)
14. About Blank (Acoustic)
15. River Don’t Care (Acoustic)
16. The Least Impossible (Acoustic)
17. Traffic Is Magic (Acoustic)
18. Away Is Mine (Acoustic)
19. No Solace (Acoustic)
20. Untitled (Acoustic)

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