My second evening at Tallinn Music Week was occupied with two events. The first was Tier Kollektiv, located in the cosy bar space of Fonoteek, to grab a rare opportunity to hear Icelandic singer Lúpína in action. It feels like Lúpína has been around for a long time; she started putting out music in 2022, the following year saw the release of her superb debut album ringluð, followed in 2024 by a second, Marglytta. Since then she’s drip-fed a number of singles, the most recent of which, ‘Lifeline’, came out earlier this month.
Lúpína’s particular brand of synth-pop – heard to excellent effect in Tallinn – is built upon a number of tensions, the most immediate being a juxtaposition of weight and fragility. Her vocals are often ethereal but have edge and strength, despite their slightness. She eased into more languid forms of electronica, ejecting percussion and just focusing on her voice with a bassline, then mixing her lyrical lines with heavy, pounding beats, sounding almost implausibly heavy. These juxtapositions occurred structurally too, on one occasion (‘gleyma’) emerging from an overwhelming climax to softness and birdsong.
Embellishing her voice with vocoders reinforced the primacy of melody in her music, only then to let rip, setting Fonoteek alight with a glorious, floor-stomping pulse (‘hættað væla’), singing snatches of refrain between cute bursts of dancing. Her finale came all too soon with ‘ein á báti’, slow and chordal, like a chorale, with an air of valediction, beats absent again, until pushing on into a processional of sorts, with Lúpína’s voice magically transformed into a choir at the end.
The rest of the evening was back in Telliskivi’s Roheline Saal, to catch some of the results from the collision of two festivals, Estonia’s Üle Heli and Lavtia’s Skanu Mežs. The strangest performance from this event came from Finnish algorave musician Joonas Siren, aka Forces. It was interesting to note the confidence, even the swagger, of his on-stage demeanour. Was he unaware of how tedious his blurring cavalcade of meaningless stuff really was? Couldn’t he perceive that everything he churned out was dynamically and behaviourally flat, like an over-crammed 2D surface? Perhaps he genuinely believed that his conveyor belt of repetitive patterns behind effluvial bursts of random sounds was interesting, or that his fracturing of basic beat forms was imaginative. If so, he was definitely wrong, but the fact that the music kept effectively restarting every few minutes suggested he actually knew all too well, and was simply trying to distract attention away from its obvious shortcomings.
More intriguing results came from Estonia’s own Erik Alalooga, whose soundworld emanates from a number of slowly-turning and otherwise moving machines, their output processed and manipulated to create long-form aural explorations. That being said, while there was plenty of the long, there wasn’t so much of the form. In practice, while there were certainly aspects of Alalooga’s music that were appealing, they tended to exhaust their limited allure fairly quickly. This was disappointing as the potential here, the creative scope, seemed significant. Yet Alalooga was content to tweak and noodle, cosied up in his largely static, industrially-inflected environment as if reluctant to roam too far away from its centre. Focused, or just stuck? Not without some interest, but ultimately it all felt a bit too safe and sound.
Better by far was Latvian musician Marta Ansone, who in the guise of Ofae is a relative newcomer on the scene. She initially took us back to the world opened up earlier by Lúpína, with a mixture of floaty, ethereal vocals over pounding, edgy beats and bass. ‘The Tower’ had an overwhelming effect, its electronic inner details all rising like Shepard tones, carrying the music, and us, ever upward, while in ‘Or Else’ she glitched the beats to the point that they acted like shards of momentum more than a pulse. Less of a song, in the conventional sense, than a maintained intense atmosphere, this established the particular tone of Ofae’s music, which is caught between tropes from pop and electronica and less driven forms of textural soundscape.
At times (as in ‘Crimson String’), Ofae vanished from the sound almost entirely, becoming a mere vocal suggestion within a large, hovering fabric; or floating words high over judder so muddy it became indistinct, while something akin to a cimbalom twanged from a distance, perhaps the catalyst for things to settle and soften. These non-song atmospherics were presented like vignettes, windows into adjacent worlds, but worlds that themselves have rules subject to change. At one point, ramped up beats and ’80s synth energy were matched with a dream pop upper layer, whereupon the speed dropped by half, articulating an altogether more considered, experimental kind of outlook and intention. Ofae released her first album, Sinder, at the start of April, and it’s a mesmerising, at times stunning listen; together with her TMW performance, it’s clear she’s an artist to keep a very close ear on.
