The COMMUTE festival, based at the Estonian Academy of Music & Theatre, takes its name from its three primary spheres of interest: COMposition, MUsic, TEchnology. i’ve mentioned previously the mixture of success and failure with regard to audiovisual works at this year’s COMMUTE, and this polarity reared its head on the second evening, at an event titled “Infinita Memoriae”, focusing on an array of installations in Tallinn’s Theatre and Music Museum. Some of them had scope built into their conception, such as Kenneth Flak‘s Autopoiesis, which produced music and visuals in response to the movements of participants within its boundaries. In theory, Spatial traces by Sandra Leon, Adrian Paemurru and Emilio Casaburi, was similarly responsive, yet when the artists demonstrated it, by drawing shapes onto a large piece of paper, it was virtually impossible to detect anything in the somewhat generic, abstract and squelchy soundscape that had been affected or influrenced by these actions.
Two of the installations were more noteworthy, in the way that they touched upon emotional poignancy, though while both of them invited meaningful engagement, they nonetheless suffered from a lack of significant scope in their conception. Adla Cameselle Barbosa‘s Before Drowning contemplated the rather nightmarish question of what might go through our minds at the point shortly before we die, while drowning. Surrounding us in images and sounds of the sea, the centrepiece of the installation was a black coffin, containing a screen with a countdown. Several times an hour, when the countdown reached zero a sequence of memories (video clips from Barbosa’s own life) appeared, repeated several times, each time faster than the last, until they faded away. i’m not sure i’ve ever experienced an installation quite so overtly morbid as this, and while its execution could hardly have been more on the nose, there was nonetheless something mildly affecting about the appearance of such personal stuff briefly materialising in such an austere environment. Yet its scope was limited to this one basic interaction, waiting for the countdown, experiencing the video clips, and then moving on.
Hele-Mai Vettik‘s Flutter was beautifully simple in conception, exploring the worries and effects of feeling attraction to someone. This was manifested in a hanging wind chime that, when shaken, filled the space with amplified tinkling sounds (both from itself and electronics) and pink shapes dancing across the walls. As the chimes quickly became motionless again, the room returned to from this all-too-brief pleasurable reverie to a state of darkness, filled with pounding bass. i was struck by the (perhaps unintended) remarkable pessimism of the piece, implying that this kind of frisson of excitement is inevitably short-lived, and always only ever a short distance from being swallowed up in a default condition of intense black gloom. (Perhaps an alternate, more positive interpretation would be to say that, without being actively pursued or maintained – shaking the chime – attraction will inevitably fade to nothing.) It’s a shame its scope was also so limited: once you’d shaken the wind chime a couple of times, you’d reached the interactive – though not the contemplative – limit, and it would have been nice if Vettik had considered more than just this stark binary of cause and effect. Multiple effects from the single cause, with an element of the unexpected (perhaps times when the dark and bass could be overcome for a longer time) would have made the work much more engaging and, i dare to say, more true to the reality of attraction as actually experienced.
Not everything at COMMUTE 2024 was audiovisual, though, and in fact some of the most compelling works during the festival were purely musical. First Kiss, a new work for bass flute, accordion and live electronics by Masters student Yui Ka Zheng, provided the kind of positive next step not suggested by Vettik’s Flutter. Taking inspiration from Otto Friedrich Theodor von Möller’s painting The Kiss, the music had a fixed, even fixated quality that entirely suited the subject matter. First Kiss was initially dronal in nature, until an increase in energy allowed the music to become more exploratory, introducing complexity. The players also became more individuated at this point, the dronal ‘tonic’ harder to grasp (despite intense vibration from the electronics), replaced for a time with distant noise until the drone resumed towards the end. As a 10-minute poetic reading of the emotional power of a first kiss, Zheng managed to capture both the focus and the fizz.
The most impactful musical works performed at this year’s festival all took place in the mid-week concert in the Academy’s Great Hall, an event titled, “Conubium Soni”. A member of the Ensemble of the Estonian Electronic Music Society, Ekke Västrik‘s new piece Breaking point, for accordion and electronics, was as appealing as it was due to to the deft way its changing and evolving sounds were handled. Not just concerned with pitch, but also density, texture and dynamic range, the music went in unexpected directions, especially an exciting episode filled with low growling notes. A false, gentle ending was disrupted by seriously intense waves of deep accordion before evaporating into super soft wisps of sound. Even more powerful was Serbian composer Valdimir Trmičić‘s The Thirteen-Star Flower of Cassiopeia, a work for accordion trio composed in 2010. The combined texture created by the three instruments was fantastically multifaceted and ever-changing: little swelling chordal shapes, some triadic, others more clustery; gentle snarls in the depths cross-fading into soft, very high and slow-moving formations, broken up by tiny arpeggios and then collapsing back into low clusters. It was all highly playful, no mere exercise in textural shape-shifting but coated in decoration and even a distinct air of flamboyance, particularly in a huge clustered climax that came out the other side in soft polarised sound.
The composition that proved most memorable – and genuinely enthralling as it played out – was Brook, by undergrad Gregor Kulla. Its soundworld wasn’t merely quiet, but at the cusp of audibility; neither was it merely gentle, but instead sounded heightened, as if greatly pressurised. Nothing was still: little taps, trills and tremolos, with occasional plunks that in this rarified context sounded almost like great boulders falling from the sky, in the process begging the question of how fragile this world actually was. Pitch became an emergent property, almost accidentally materialising from varying kinds of friction. The music became even more beautiful as small melodic shapes appeared in the midst of wan streaks and noisy moans and sighs. At no point did Kulla break the spell, from start to end we are immersed in pure magic.
