Despite the fact I’ve been coming to Estonia every year for the past decade, this was my first time attending Tallinn Music Week. It didn’t take long for me to start wishing it was my tenth. Festivals are usually like restaurants with prix fixe offerings, where you turn up and consume the lot. TMW operates like the world’s largest buffet, with a variety of cuisines to choose from, a plethora of dishes to try, and completely freedom to move between them all. The precise timings for each artist’s performance are listed, so it’s possible to put together intricate playlists while plotting the necessary manoeuvres between venues. (Thankfully, pretty much everything was located within Tallinn’s Telliskivi Creative City, making quick dashes from place to place easy to achieve.)
For my first evening, i concocted a menu from four different events: Classical:NEXT, Fenno-Ugria Night, Tuulikki Bartosik x Sander Mölder x Frank Raudsepp and Paavli.LIVE. The first of those was a big mistake, in the company of Alexander Motovilov & Motovilov Trio (a clumsy name if ever there was one), who delivered 30 minutes of strikingly basic banality. It was like some insipid underscore, the kind of derivative, post-Nyman Simpletonianism that even the most dull-witted AI could effortlessly churn out (but why would it bother?). Bolting for the door the moment they finished, i fled Fotografiska and headed for the Roheline Saal (green hall), and the Fenno-Ugria Night, celebrating all things folk-related from the wide Eurasian cultures related to Estonia. They were between acts, so i made my way around, admiring the folk dress-attired denizens of the hall, topping up on a rustic beetroot pasty and a glass of beer, and getting set for surely the most maverick performer of the evening, Olev Muska.
Muska’s latest album, My Mouth Sang / My Heart Sank, has recently been released. The album explores – and, in Muska’s customary way, radically reinterprets – folk tunes set by Estonia’s most ardent exponent of folk music, Veljo Tormis. It was interesting to note the differences from Muska’s performance last year, following the release of his previous album New Estonian Waltzes. Where that had been frenetic, even fever pitched, pumped up and hopped up, he was noticeably more measured. The music again spoke as a wonderfully bizarre stream of consciousness, one track following another like so many variations on the same skew-whiff theme. But it also sang – or, rather, Muska himself sang, lending his already entertaining performance an endearing air of karaoke. Muska’s voice was entirely natural and (evidently) untrained, thereby connecting authentically with the democratised spirit promulgated by Tormis. His vocals were by turns low-key and cavorting wildly, matched by a similar swing in the music between light whimsy and walls of noise. Above all, though, there was the recognisable tone that permeates and defines so much of Tormis’ output, the imprint of regilaul, manifesting in focused, cyclic forms of expression, in Muska’s hands built upon stasis fields of beats and bass. Muska’s music has always walked a path combining respect and irreverence, and it was fascinating to witness here a more serious side permeating the playfulness.
Whereupon it was back to Fotografiska for Tuulikki Bartosik x Sander Mölder x Frank Raudsepp. The performance, which lasted around 40 minutes, eventually got going following a lengthy delay caused by false starts and assorted technical snafus. Nominally the piece took its inspiration from the concept of ‘home’, and this was exemplified in Raudsepp’s images and footage projected behind Bartosik and Mölder – urban and rural, abstract and concrete (literally), buildings and people, faces, actions, lives, communities. The extent to which the music corresponded to this was debatable. Bartosik and Mölder maintained an innocuous atmosphere, tame, mild, polite, restricting themselves to minimal ideas and repetitive patterns, more about vibe than substance. They were at their best when they dared to venture beyond such plunky noodlings, embracing pulse and punch and, most engaging of all, extensive lyricism, courtesy of Bartosik’s accordion. Only then did the music align better with Raudsepp’s personal vignettes; it’s a shame these moments were so brief.
For my final event of the evening (dessert, perhaps?), i had a 30-minute stroll deeper into Tallinn’s moonlit suburbs, to the Paavli Culture Factory. There to experience a group i’ve enjoyed a lot previously, the Danish vocal group døtre. To date they’ve released two EPs, I’d Rather Stay Awake in 2024 and Masquerade last year, both of which are excellent, and which formed the basis for their half hour set. It was a sublime marriage of style and substance, with all four vocalists elegantly dressed – their fifth performer on electronics mysteriously masked in black – a mix of ethereal and opulent, just like their music. They moved, smooth and seductive as if in a Robert Palmer video, while beats caressed and bass drilled through our bodies. They became sultry, the beats languid, but the bass turned more intense, marking this out as a very different experience from the relatively gentle tone of their EPs, transformed from textural dream pop into something highly tangible, direct and immense, waves of juddering bass encasing their vocals, causing them to ripple uncannily while they vocalised in unison.
It proved especially powerful during ‘Bend Out Of Shape’, when they dropped back to a lone singer, the song here rendered an ultimate combination of ferocious bass buzz with gentle, fragile vocals impossibly cooing through it all, gorgeous and overwhelming at once. Given extra electronica crunch, the ending was striking, cancelling out to soft lyrical statement: “It’s not sexy, I don’t agree”. This interplay of empowerment, veering between ostensibly aloof and demonstrably seductive, typified their performance, phrases effortlessly emerging through the pulsating beats – “I’ll be your fantasy … I could be anyone … I could be the girl of your dreams … all eyes on me”. This last was perhaps the most telling moment of the evening; at first, nothing pitched at all, just beats with speech and whispers, before yielding to a desire to pound at speed, caught up in hypnotic repetitions partially broken by electronic glitches. They ended, as they surely had to, with ‘Empress’, set to a huge, heartbeat-like pulse, which they openly defied with soft silky vocals and gliding choreography, even, at the very end, coquettishly brandishing foldout fans. døtre have been around for a couple of years but, thus far, don’t seem to have made the deep impression they deserve; perhaps their time has finally come.
