UNIQUE artists will give music fans an insight into cutting-edge electronica from Estonia on November 17 at Glasgow’s Stereo.
Titled Electronic Communications: Exchanging Messages Through Sound, the late-night gig is part of Estonia Now, a multi-arts festival running in venues across the city from November 12-18 in celebration of the Estonian Republic’s centenary.
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While the festival also offers a chance to see Estonian National Ballet make their debut in Scotland at Tramway (November 16 and 17), or learn more about the country during a public lecture at Kelvin Hall by Estonian Ambassador Tiina Intelmann (November 15), Electronic Communications is a chance to hear musicians who rarely play live on these shores.
The night is co-produced by Estonian promoters Powerplant and Glasgow’s Taikano, an underground techno night which recently celebrated its first birthday.
Taikano’s head honcho, Ajay C, will start the evening, followed by a set from DJ Ilmajaam aka Viktor Vinogradov, a resident at Wales’s prestigious Freerotation festival.
Born in the early 1980s in Tallinn to a Russian family of engineers, Vinogradov started exploring vinyl when it was typical for every family in the then Soviet country to have a record-player. A feature of the country’s now-burgeoning electronic scene since 2000, he describes himself as a “one-man effort to spread interesting and hard-to-find sounds by presenting them from vinyl records and forming one continuous journey”.
The work of headliner Hypnosaurus, aka Aivar Tonso, goes further back to the early 1990s, when Estonia regained de facto independence from Soviet Russia.
Like Vinogradov, Tonso grew up in a Russian area of the Estonian capital, a part of the city dominated by tower blocks.
Living on the top floor was a boon to the young Tonso back in the days of the Iron Curtain – he could better pick up the sounds of Sonic Youth, Cabaret Voltaire and Detroit techno being broadcast by John Peel from Maida Vale.
Hypnosaurus’s earliest recordings, made with an old Soviet synthesizer called Polivox, are looked upon today as key works in the development of Estonian techno.
Shortlived but influential, Hypnosaurus called it a day in 1995. Now, as he heads this pioneering delegation, he has released a new Hypnosaurus EP on Tallinn-based label Porridge Bullet.
If there is often a spacey, almost transcendental aspect to Tonso’s work, it’s ramped up with Electronic Communications’ other two live acts, HAPE aka Taavi Tulev, pictured above, and Cubus Larvik, a duo who create pulsing, treacle-thick ambient that soothes and intrigues.
Karl Saks, one half of Cubus Larvik, is also a choreographer who will perform his piece State and Design at Tramway on November 13 and 14 alongside Sigrid Savi’s Imagine There’s A Fish and Mart Kangro’s Start, a piece described as “a milestone of Estonian contemporary dance”.
Not to be missed will be the fully improvised live set by HAPE, the name of the latest incarnation of composer, sound designer and nature recorder Tulev. He checks flight paths and shipping schedules in order to ensure his recordings of birds, breezes and the sounds of the frozen Baltic are untouched by human interference.
In HAPE, Tulev crafts the recordings into rhythms and soundscapes so alluring you want to stay in his nature-rich world.
While Tulev’s architectural background informs his meticulous music, so too does it underpin his extensive work as a sound designer and audio installation artist, with his work Uurali Kaja, a permanent feature in the Estonian National Museum being one of the largest sound installations in the world.
Tulev, who largely works alone in his Zen-like studio on the outskirts of Tallinn, says it was the stress of office work as an architect which inspired him to create the calming sounds of HAPE. “I think those things that you need to give to yourself,” Tulev told The National, “those are the things you want to be able to give to the world around you too.”
Nov 17, Stereo, Glasgow, 11pm to 3am, £9 (+bf). Tickets: bit.ly/ElectronicCommsGlasgow
soundcloud.com/krill www.facebook.com/hypnosaurus soundcloud.com/cubuslarvik soundcloud.com/taavitulev
Estonia Now runs at venues across Glasgow from November 12-18. Tickets and full listings at bit.ly/EstoniaNow www.ev100.ee
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