Tallinn Music Week 2021

Tallinn Music Week
Tallinn, Estonia
September 30-October 2, 2021


The annual Tallinn Music Week has benefitted from excellent timing, with its 2020 and 2021 editions managing a placement outside of any hardcore lockdown actions, assembling a roster from outside of Estonia, albeit mostly from bordering or nearby lands. As ever, all musical forms are welcome, and what seems like most of the city's venues are employed in a sequence of evenings where a promoter or record label takes over a bar or club, assembling a run of mostly 30 minute showcase sets. All delegates, and the general public, are able to scoot from station to station, sometimes deciding on a choice clutch of two or three acts, or otherwise dashing from one joint to another, just to catch single acts each time. There can be targeted commando missions, or reclined chance encounters, or a blend of both, however a punter wants to manage the flow.

The quirky Club Of Different Rooms offered a highly specialised evening of Finno-Ugric folk tradition, from Estonia and Finland, easy to hear the subtleties when this upstairs retreat invites its audience to remove their footwear and recline on a wide range of soft furnishings. The following evening, Different Rooms hosted the Estonian folk Duo Ruut, having the audience desert said soft furnishings, gathering in the standing space before the stage, for a show of intimate acoustic communication. Doubled vocals harmonising, along with doubled playing of the traditional kannel box zither, in its larger incarnation.

Just five minutes away, the Latvian dark metal lay in wait, as the wonderful Sveta Baar hosted a night of artists chosen by Void Valley, a mixture of promoter and record label. Not so fresh from Riga were Oghre, their bearded singer garbed in what looked like monkish robes, lank hair hanging as he groaned powerfully towards the stage-floor. He was partnered by drums, bass and twinned guitars, emerging out of the Latvian mists, shovelling guttural grit. Low tones pummelled into a gathering deep mass, while guitars speared out of a blinding glare. He held extended, mournful high notes, before the lead sludge lapped over the broken ridge, inevitably building to cataclysmic levels of a vibrational ringing. The turbulence continued later in the night, with Dreamkrusher! and Akli, from Estonia and Lithuania. Sveta Baar is Tallinn's glorious home of imaginative metal manifestations, as well as alternative, confrontational music, generally.

If becoming a regular at TMW, it was sometimes possible to revisit artists caught in previous years. The Estonian solo electronics composer Roland Karlson played a freebie outdoor afternoon set in 2020, but now he found himself indoors, with the increased atmosphere shaped by Heaven's Trumpet, a record label with a reliably skewed taste in music. Separated from the Telliskivi Creative City hub of TMW, Uus Laine lies a few streets away, tucked down an even smaller avenue. Its name meaning 'new wave' in English, there's a kitsch 1970s exotica in place, like it's an ironic strip club habitation, boasting mirrorballs and golden elephant heads.

Karlson's prime tool is a simple laptop, but he sculpts complicated epics that roll with a slowcoach dance motion, simultaneously mimicking the ranks of an orchestra, or the horn sections of a jazz big band. His music is loaded with intricate detail, layers upon layers of varied textures, skipping and flopping, sometimes blessed with an Indonesian gamelan shimmer. Cascading polyrhythms could contain a sproingy harpsichord source-sound, before a boom-bassed speedster took flight, adorned with an abundance of micro- melodies. Karlson is loaded with ideas, swooping atonally, like a wounded bellows, following down the knobbly tracks made by the Autechre duo from mysterious Rochdale, England. Hazily danceable, cerebrally flush.

Karlson was followed by the Ensemble Of The Estonian Music Society (Eesti Elektroonilise Seltsi Ansambel), more refugees from the 2020 Sveta scene. A membership of seven, in this incarnation, they rocketed back to the 1950s sound of Forbidden Planet, a darkened cosmos of low humming, high whistling and sequenced birdsongs. Space rippled in conceptual patterns, as these besuited beings concentrated in front of devices ranging from laptops to cellphones, keyboards to consoles, haunting the atmospheric environs of old-school electronics, attuned to Kraftwerk, as well as to current ambient strategies.

Kiwanoid (from Estonia) was clad in a completely body-covering, clinging blackness, including a head-encaser, the lone chest-word 'nothing' and a techno-miner's headlamp being the few signs of 'expression.' The live set was not quite as compelling as the Kiwanoid recorded output, but still grabbed tough with its progression of bassy glugging, topped by squirting details.

Not even a mapped locational pinpoint could land your scribe at the new venue Winkel, as he wandered a three-street nexus, looking for its mystery door. This messed with his planned strategy for discovering the music booked by the Latvian festival Skaņu Mežs, doubtless Riga's leading weirdo event. Once stumbled upon, the winding Winkel impressed, down its steps into a labyrinthine castle dungeon interior, with no shortage of chambers, up down and around stairways, with acts playing on multiple stages. The deadpan Russian vocal and electronics duo of Tonoptik was the only act that your scribe caught in full, marked out by a minimalist development, steadily building their dark moodiness. It was time to cross town for another Russian combo, the all-female rocksters Lucidvox, at the F-Hoone club's (you guessed it) Russian Sounds night.

Lucidvox are immediately impressive, tightly together, but swirling around a loosened psychedelic vortex, each member continually soloing as they contribute to the surfing groove. Singer Alina plays flute and keyboards, out front, with virtually her entire top half consumed by a million pearls, in a challenge for the globe's largest neck-wear construction. Lead guitarist Galla, bassist Anna and drummer Nadezhda are all hyperactively inventive, in their own ways, picking out stinging lines, forging sinuous patterns and striking side-crashing snap-beats. Lucidvox have a submerged Russian folkloric heart, but they mostly transmit an urgent head-music punk pulsation, and their status as perhaps TMW's finest act was a very well-placed climax, as we approached the witching hour on the festival's final night.

For the last two years TMW has been shifting dates to suit the virus, and it's heading for another different month in 2022, between the 4th and 8th of May...

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