As an epilogue to my excursions in Estonia during the summer and autumn, i want to highlight two albums that are tangentially related to the events i attended. The first is by During the Tormis 95 extravaganza in August, i mentioned Olev Muska, an Australian-Estonian composer who among other things was presenting his new album New Estonian Waltzes. Since the mid-1980s, Muska’s output has demonstrated an irrepressible urge to celebrate music from the past – particularly folk and indigenous music – by cross-breeding it with electronics to create delirious chimeric creations. The progenitor of this new album is, appropriately enough, Old Estonian Waltzes, Muska’s first album released 40 years ago. A gleefully upbeat take on the original material, it’s a work very obviously of its time, festooned with early synths and drum machines, with evocations of Kraftwerk and New Romantic colouring the Estonian waltzes, and even a distinct touch of muzak.
This new album is also a work of its time, its 16 bite-size tracks driven along by all the trappings of contemporary electronica. That being said, stylistically speaking, one of its most endearing qualities is the fact that it’s not only of its time but also of different parts of the last 40 years. Evocations of late ’70s Kraftwerk, the sample-laden late ’80s pop of The Art of Noise, ’90s Aphex Twin, as well as early ’00s Plaid (think Spokes) and Luke Vibert (think YosepH) are all in there, incongruously working in tandem with the tunes and singing of traditional Estonian music.
To single out particular tracks is perhaps pointless in such a cavalcade of craziness, but they’re arguably at their best when Muska, clearly no musical introvert in any case, really lets rip. The two ‘Vändra Polka’ tracks are a case in point. The first, ‘Vändra Polka Dinky’ lays its cheerful plinky tune over rapid, restless beats while a nonchalant bass meanders below; it’s utterly infectious, feel-good in the best sense, and you’re left smiling ridiculously, that is when you’re not wanting to loudly sing along. It segues into a brief snatch of the original historical recording of ‘Vändra Polka’, before giving the tune to a wavering synth while the beats propel along even quicker than before. The tempo feels concentric, laidback, moderate and fast simultaneously, but the total effect is exhilarating fun.
The sense of pace is often unpredictable, as in ‘Lõke Lennuväljal / Corroboree On The Tarmac’, where electronic bleeps play out in the midst of strange looming noise elements, in a track that doesn’t seem to be going anywhere until everything hugely intensifies 30 seconds before the end. Likewise ‘Laulu Võim / The Power of Song’, where punchy laser pulses fire at snippets of historic folk singing, until the mid-point when Muska switches to a quicker pulse, the folk singing turning into a beautifully ever-so-slightly cheesy crooning while the beats push unstoppably onward. Similar momentum runs through ‘Ilus Neiu Kiigel / Pretty Girl on a Swing’, the rhythms of a creaky swing mixed with choral singing, which Muska then drapes in purest synthpop, only to pull the rug on it halfway through, and again toward the end for unexpected moments of repose.
‘Orja Palk / Wages of a Slave’ brings to mind the earthy, testosterone-drenched swagger of some of Veljo Tormis’ particularly robust songs (as well as its cycling quasi-monotonous recitation), with blurting, cut-up vocal snippets set within punchbag electronica, overlaid with wild ululations. Another highlight is ‘Hüppetants / The Hopping Dance’, in which the main tune remains only potential, getting regularly lost, obscured and overwhelmed by swirling cascades of notes, hopping bass and glitched repetitions.
This is the party album you never knew you needed, one that, as in all Muska’s work, overflows with affection and reverence for its source material, crossed with a deep, heartfelt desire to accompany, arrange and adorn it in the most fantastically strange, gaudy and madcap sonic costumes.
Released a few months back by Glitch Please, New Estonian Waltzes is available on vinyl and download.
The other new release is by Sander Saarmets, who will be featured at one of the forthcoming AFEKT festival concerts. i’ve admired Saarmets’ music for several years, both his live performances and his first album, Naterijeka, which he released under the name Muschraum 20 years ago. That was light and delicate, equal parts abstract and ambient, and as with Muska, Saaremets’ new album Bleu Précieux not only picks up where that left off but expands things significantly further.
The album brings together the delicious sounds of analogue and modular synths, using meantone temperament, with organic stimuli (specifically plants) to help shape and generate the material. The balance of tonal elements is especially effective. Opening track ‘Unfold’ has a clanging melody, diatonic but fuzzy at the edges, dancing arpeggio shapes within a soft dronescape. It’s lovely the way this subsequently eases off, the fuzz taking over, and occasional notes continuing to sing out but not connecting. This track establishes the paradigm, and everything that follows can be heard as siblings, a cluster of individual pieces that are clearly all of the same species.
Often a sense of forward motion is unclear. ‘In Waves’ bobs within a reverberant, implied dronal space, where edgy bursts of notes and occasional laser pulses are balanced by a pervasive gentleness. It has a fascinating chiaroscuro: becoming dense, even overwhelming, it seems to radiate brightness, yet one can’t help feeling this is something nocturnal, illuminated in darkness. As things settle later, there’s the impression of a chorus-like idea that’s been lurking within, fragmented, refracted and overlapping itself. There’s a whiff of melancholy to it, and in the title track that becomes a palpable sense of struggle, moving in fits and starts (similar bursts to before). The biological connection to the music – plant feedback used to generate voltages – is clear here, leading to the most fascinating inner activity that’s unequivocally organic.
‘Bloom’ places high burbling nothings above fading in beat punches, which are gradually revealed to be a slow pulse. Here, too, the music is caught in tension; there’s a tightness in the way it’s articulated, like pent-up energy, each beat a lurch forward as energy is momentarily ejected. Once again it’s located within, and surrounded by, a cloud of stuff, radiating out from this central core. One of the high points is ‘Rosée’, where long sustained notes are the foundation for the gentlest form of burbleplink, all very dronal and ostensibly static. Saarmets is a master of innocuous, slow burn music, and here as elsewhere the track takes several minutes before revealing that that’s what it’s been doing. Three minutes in, and we’re into a climax where super-slow melody notes resound amidst a ton of noise and resonance, an immersive and gorgeous sequence that Saarmets doesn’t labour but soon causes to recede. We’re left with the sense of a ground bass, the track’s trudging, descending bass figure again injecting a note of melancholy to things.
Most impactful of all, though, is ‘Signaux’, the longest track on the album (though not by much), which opens with twin layers, somewhat boomy arpeggios and lasers shooting out from behind. Its texture evolves slowly, the core remaining the same but gaining additional elements, striking against it, until the centre itself is taken over. That innocuous quality to Saarmets’ musicmaking, also evident here, is deceptive, belying the quantity of highly detailed elements that are actually present, everywhere, located in the fore-, middle- and background, a real landscape of activity. Each time i listen to ‘Signaux’ i’m struck by the ambiguity of its motion; i said how a sense of forward motion is unclear but here it’s practically unfathomable, things constantly move, twist, squirm, squelch, drift and collide but the whole sonic organism has infinite lightness, floating on air, suggesting what we’re hearing is highly magnified movement taking place at quantum levels.
Bleu Précieux is a tour de force of ambient electronica, displaying a sublime combination of lightness and weight, energy and stillness, abstraction and expression. Its soundworld is deeply immersive – speakers are good, headphones are great – and if you’re anything like me, you’ll find its 38-minute runtime to be over in no time at all, prompting an immediate relisten. It’s a world not just to lose yourself in, but to be safely lost in, roaming its viscous, vaporous soundspaces and in the process encountering ever new sonic fronds and formations. It’s like music in a microscope; we become small, surrounded on all sides by the infinitesimal made immense.
Also released by Glitch Please a few weeks ago, Bleu Précieux is available on vinyl and download.
