PIQSIQ

Websites:  https://piqsiq.bandcamp.com/
Origin: Kitikmeot and Kivalliq, Nunavut Yellowknife → Northwest Territories, 🇨🇦
Biography:

Inuksuk Mackay and Tiffany Ayalik are Inuit style throat singers performing ancient traditional songs and eerie new compositions.

PIQSIQ is an Inuit throat-singing duo formed by sisters Tiffany Kuliktana Ayalik and Kayley Inuksuk Mackay. With roots in Nunavut’s Kitikmeot and Kivalliq regions and raised in Yellowknife, Northwest Territories, the pair have emerged as one of Canada’s most distinctive contemporary Indigenous acts, blending traditional katajjaq with looping, layered harmonics, percussion, and atmospheric production to create a sound that is both ancestral and strikingly modern. Their name comes from the Inuktitut word piqsiq, a wind-driven Arctic snowstorm in which snow appears to rise back into the sky—a fitting image for music that transforms ancient vocal practice into something immersive, elemental, and new.

Singing together since childhood, Ayalik and Mackay developed their musical bond long before PIQSIQ became a formal project. Raised in Yellowknife and shaped by time on the land, the sisters began practicing Inuit throat singing at a young age, carrying forward a tradition historically performed face-to-face by women as both game, endurance test, and cultural expression. In PIQSIQ, they retain the relational core of katajjaq while expanding its possibilities through live looping and contemporary sound design, creating performances that feel as much like sonic environments as songs. Their work has consistently emphasized that Inuit throat singing is not a relic of the past, but a living art form capable of carrying new stories and new emotional worlds.

Before PIQSIQ came into full focus, both sisters were also members of Quantum Tangle, the acclaimed Indigenous trio with Greyson Gritt that won the 2017 Juno Award for Indigenous Album of the Year for Tiny Hands. That success brought national attention, but PIQSIQ gave Ayalik and Mackay a more personal and culturally centered vehicle—one rooted directly in Inuit sound, northern atmosphere, and artistic reclamation. Their recordings since then have traced an increasingly ambitious path: Altering the Timeline introduced a modern, loop-based approach to throat singing; Quviasugvik: In Search of Harmony re-examined Christmas music through an Inuit lens; Taaqtuq Ubluriaq: Dark Star deepened their atmospheric and conceptual reach; and Live from Christ Church Cathedral placed their work in a resonant, spiritually charged setting that also invited reflection on colonial history and Indigenous survival.

By the mid-2020s, PIQSIQ had established themselves as artists whose work moves fluidly between concert performance, conceptual recording, film, and cultural storytelling. Their music has been praised for its haunting beauty, improvisational intensity, and ability to merge breath, rhythm, and technology without losing the intimacy at the core of Inuit throat singing. In 2024, they recorded the soundtrack for the Canadian animated film Sunburnt Unicorn, underscoring the cinematic dimension of their work.

Their 2025 album Legends marked a major new statement, building an immersive song cycle around figures from Inuit mythology and oral tradition. Recorded at Monarch Studios in Vancouver with producer Alex Penney, the album drew on beings such as Amautalik, Ijiraq, Inuarulliit, Mahaha, and Qallupilluit, using voice, loops, and atmosphere to translate oral storytelling into a deeply contemporary sonic form. The release quickly became one of the duo’s most acclaimed works, and in 2026 Legends earned PIQSIQ a Juno nomination for Global Music Album of the Year, confirming the duo’s growing stature within Canada’s contemporary musical landscape.

At their best, PIQSIQ do far more than reinterpret tradition: they extend it. Through their work, Ayalik and Mackay have helped reassert Inuit throat singing as a living, evolving practice—one capable of holding memory, resistance, spirituality, humour, fear, and wonder all at once. Their music is unmistakably northern, deeply rooted, and entirely their own.