For my third and final evening at Tallinn Music Week i was occupied with just a single event, hosted by the Glitch Please label. Rushing across town after an Estonian Music Days concert (words about that coming soon), i made it in time for the performance given by V4R1, the duo comprising Sander Saarmets on electronics (whose Bleu Précieux was one of my best albums of 2025) and Mikk-Mait Kivi on visuals. Both working in real time, they pulled us into an utmost immersive world.
Slowly evolving textures, beats low-key but potent, shifting and looping, pitch present only as rogue notes and recessed chords, barely any bass, everything always in flux. On screen, images resembling moon rocks, asteroids, microscopic objects, all somewhat abstracted. Beatless suspensions take hold, everything kind of transfixed, then – gasp! – pounding beyond, slow but implied fast, dronal, propulsive, holding back, radiant, uplifting, ecstatic. The visuals grow amorphous, like wireframe biological species coming into being. And still the slow form evolution, gentle but with a potency and impact that make it mesmerising.
Lovely grooves that they both lock into; just as i wish they’d go double speed, the beats actually vanish for a time, only to gradually materialise again in a new form, while the visuals turn noirish yellow, then back to moon rocks and large scale wireframe constructions. Everything ends up in a more extreme flux, as if the component parts of both sight and sound were broken down, in a state of being reformed. At the last, pitches shine out like soft light beams, beats crunch and punch, chords drift in the middle distance. Sublime.
They’re followed by Kiwanoid, who turns Fonoteek into his own private beat laboratory. A rapid pummel pulse is the default, like an overclocked heartbeat effortlessly driving on while a plethora of more transient shapes stretch, cavort and align with it. With such a rapid underlay the sense of pace keeps shifting – now superfast, now leisurely, now a snail’s pace – at the same time giving the impression we’re zooming in and out to examine the music from wildly different vantage points and perspectives (alternate dimensions?). The beats drop out, we float under whatever momentum remains, while possibly AI-generated images of ants and earth formations fill the screen. There seems to be a correspondence – the more complex the beat structures, the more complex the visuals – and things ramp up, pulsing and firing at speed and the screen is a blur of fuzz and interference.
The correspondence breaks, the music drilling into us while the visuals glide in an abstract geometric ballet. It’s utterly mesmeric. And we’re back to where we began, the breakneck pummelling, the unstoppable pounding pulse and my electrified heart trying to keep up. I close my eyes and speed loses all meaning: we’re flying, we’re motionless, nothing moves, everything convulses. The music transcends pulse and tempo and charges the air with endless ripples of energy. Pure glory. I stop thinking and submit.
Following a necessary pause to not just catch my breath but practically recalibrate my being, my Tallinn Music Week experience is brought to an end by someone i’ve admired for a while, French electronica artist s8jfou. Kneeling on the floor, facing away, he takes us somewhere entirely other. Now everything is less certain. It’s a strange kind of propulsion, irresistible, erratic, barely controlled, meticulous, full of paradoxes. The territory is drum and bass, the landscape is alien, fashioned on the fly. The visuals – featuring a GUI that changes completely with each new track, tailor made (or arbitrarily whim-made) for each one, to spectacular effect – are the most curious combination of real-time laptop adjustments and anecdotal images and descriptions, which we can only connect with fleetingly – a sentence here, an image there – the music unstoppably pressing on, away, beyond.
Whereupon it becomes like Ryoji Ikeda with diary entries, their inscrutable narrative the accompaniment to breakbeats and layers of glitched pulses sliding between concentric speeds. s8jfou plunges ever deeper into the underworld of the music, leaving us wondering what, if anything, his continual on-screen adjustments are doing sonically. The visual effects are clear, triggering bursts of rapid-fire journal accounts, video clips, shifts in display and readout, yet the music feels unassailable, implacable, preordained. It becomes an incongruous mixture of drum and bass pace and intensity with ambient electronica sensitivity, the two implausibly working together, in s8jfou’s hands made simpatico. And all the time, right until the end, the constant glimpses into heartfelt, personal reflections and admissions, a consistent, surprisingly intimate visual core underlying – or perhaps leading to each and every one of – the wonderful, erratic, abstract beatronic fireworks.
