Tallinn is a city of riddles. One of half-erased signs, memories in people’s heads, and histories that slowly disappear into the ground or become a layer of grimy residue on a building’s facade. Many aspects of the city do feel, initially, at a remove or happy in operating out of sight: if not of another world, certainly of another way of thinking. You often get the sense of a dour provincial stubbornness and dancing to a different drum being the key ingredients. You can also project an idea that Tallinn is a place where technology meets its animist cousin. And you’d be half right both times. Tallinn is “rum”. One of many street-level examples of this almost banal sense of remove are the stuffed, feasting animals in a window near the eastern city wall [the Viru Väravad]; the sort of weird real-time tableau that is more at home in a dream or an old print. 

Talk of dancing to a different drum reminds me of the remarkable event I went to on the opening night of Tallinn Music Week in 2018. After watching the festival’s opening concert in the grand Russian Cultural Centre I popped up the road to the  EKKM [Estonian Contemporary Art Museum], which was once a boiler room for the old power plant now known as KultuuriKatel. There, amidst what can only be described as a ground hugging cumulus cloud’s worth of dry ice,  I took in a showcase from Tallinn’s Serious Serious label, with Stockholm’s Maria W Horn and local legend [and certified space cadet], Ratkiller. As well as being offered homemade soup I was given a book on Tarkovsky’s film Stalker, called Stalking Stalker by local head, musician and organiser, Andres Lõo. A dizzying display of generosity and a providential gift, as I was in one of the locations Tarkovsky used in his legendary film, and in spitting distance of the famous UN tower. This is one version of Tallinn, then, a city hiding in plain sight.

There’s another Tallinn on the rise, the development of which may lead you to raise a weather eye. This is the Tallinn represented by the Ülemiste Centre near the airport, a “Euro-lifestyle” monolith which is a bit of a shock; simply due to its blatantly pan-national nature. Yes, these English language exhortations to shop exist everywhere else on the continent. But Tallinn? It doesn’t fit. Yet.

Understanding Tallinn needs a number of maps that will continually change over time. One for what is there, one for what is coming and one for what isn’t there anymore. The city is a much more sprawling and diffuse, and disparate one than the tourist normally sees. And the wanderer will cross multiple force fields, with many portals to dive into. There is Russian Tallinn, or the rising Estonian-Russian-International Tallinn. Or the religious, ancient and imperial Tallinns that draw the tourists. Easy to fall into and difficult to crawl out of is the drinker’s and poet’s Tallinn, encompassing different generations of wildnesses courtesy of the Sveta and Valli bars and the KuKu klubi. Then there are the peripheral Tallinns of Kopli, Kadriorg and Pirita. The city of the botanist, the swimmer and the professor. The Tallinn of the radio tower and the Composer’s House, hidden away in the Maakri, or the new brewery and HALL near the seaplane harbour. The Tallinn that’s on the move - seen with the sea-facing Kalamaja district - disappearing in front of your eyes. 

Wanderings around the city are inevitable during your own mapping process. And one could easily walk in a reverie through the Old Town and get gently lost amongst the narrow streets and cobbled alleys. But we should take care not to paint the place as one stuffed full of noble savages tuned into Dame Nature’s deeper rhythms. Rather, making an effort in getting to know the place with its many contradictions and oddly quotidian secrets is an ever-giving one. For instance, Tallinn’s history is one that is permanently at play in its current reshaping. There is a sense of ambition, even ruthlessness present in the place, and previous iterations of Tallinn are now being reshuffled like a pack of cards. Some psyched-out, switched-on cartographer should make a memory map of the places that have disappeared. And which version of the city is currently the best bet? This is where the book Andres kindly gave me at the EKKM party comes into play. City headspaces can be given another dimension when this passage, written by Peeter Laurits, is properly ingested. It’s about Tarkovsky but can easily be reemployed to understand the city’s restless, weird, protean spirit and many of its inhabitants’ actions. Italics are mine.

Escapism is not a popular concept in our society, it’s more of a curse word. Popular words include struggle, success, growth and expansion, but escapism is defined through fleeing and loss. Moving from one place to another, turning away, is flight seen through only one angle, it might be called approach or arrival from another. When we turn our back on where escapists are leaving and focus instead on where they are going, we can also configure an escapist avant-garde. Tendencies that seem completely asocial also embody a new type of sociality. Stalker, who looks away from where social pressure tells him to look, is an earthworm, who tenderises and aerates the manure for a new and different kind of society to sprout. 

[Participants experiencing Musicity x TAB 2019 on location.]

It’s worth also saying that Tallinn and all that goes on here does not reflect Estonia. For one thing the changes here seem to be happening in a different way. In relation to other Estonian cities and towns, such as Tartu, Rakvere and Narva, Tallinn has an almost teenage yearning to try things out for size, to rip things up and start again. This may be down to access to funds, a capital city’s confidence in turning heritage on its head or just a desire to show it can be like anywhere else, not some mythical faerieland ready to be patronised and plundered every tourist season. Regardless, the cityscape is rapidly changing. Buildings that had stood in ruins on my first visit are now reinvented into something else. For how long, nobody knows. And for whom?  Developments around Kultuurikatel and Telliskivi balance unsteadily on a tightrope between manifestations of Europe-wide “creative play parks” for the seriously inclined, and somewheres that could be nowhere else.  

But enough postulations on a macro level. Many can do that and this article is not a glorified prospectus. To come to terms with the city and the sounds on this collection we need to set our divining rods to street level.

One curious feature in Tallinn that I haven’t come across in such a concentrated manner in other Estonian cities [though it is to be seen in Tartu] is the ever-present graffiti on doors. The quality of concentration and style of the graffiti “feels” very different, as if propelled by another spirit guide than which demands you merely make a mark. In the areas behind Telliskivi, in Pelgulinn and Kalamaja, virtually every door one passes displays a plethora of mysterious codes and signs. Sometimes these are minor works of art, given care and attention by one hand over a short concentrated burst, others prime examples of street décollage, where multiple hands have added disparate sets of sigils and runes, to ward off any evil. Others contain a single gnomic instruction. The doors themselves are remarkable;  often decrepit, battered, seemingly the silent witnesses of many minor, personal sieges. Despite them surviving for so long in such a state, those trained in semiotics should map them before they are swept away.  Maybe the tags and slogans and patterns act as a city-wide, bastardised Rosetta stone for unlocking the headspaces inhabited by the artists on this collection.   

[Factory Roof]

Certainly to the outsider, this rapidly changing city sometimes feels as if it needs a special portal to enter. Its memories are in need of some form of encryption too, if only to mark new times and spaces, and disappeared places. Places like the gloriously cosy and crazy pub-come-radio-studio that was snugly hidden off the Kaarli puiestee [I think], or scrubbed-up Kopli [a place of constant change, from meadowland to shipyard and Soviet base, a place for misfits and the working class, and now an upwardly mobile residential area]. Or the once abandoned coastline around Lennusadam, ominously flanked by the shades of memory projected by the old prison. Maybe this is what the tagged doors speak of.

I wonder if a number of the artists on this collection have marked their own door in Tallinn. Or, taking a cue from Peeter Laurits’ earthworm, have decided to “tenderise and aerate” thoughts of the city they live in to map a specific set of memories triggered by the place they have picked to soundtrack. These thoughts of certainly come to mind with the work of Estonian folk stalwart, Tuulikki Bartosik and her work, ‘Last One Standing’, which pays tribute to Kalamaja Cemetery Park, a happy place where you can play with your kids or cross expectantly towards the new brewery complex and HALL club in search of C21st kicks. The park was once the site of an ancient cemetery of some five centuries’ standing; a place that turned up seven layers of graves at some point during the Soviet occupation. Bartosik’s mastery of her craft gives us an affecting lament, the accordion’s wheezes and gasps and descending cadences speak of things that are no longer there, no longer worth too much thought. And Bartosik’s skill in letting her instrument do the talking - a rare one in these times of too many explanations -  keeps alive a dialogue with an older city that would otherwise be pinned and mounted in a museum.  

Others seem to be mapping the process of change itself. The aural space created in Aivar Tonso’s ‘Põhjala Factory’ [an ode to the famous old rubber factory in Kopli] is both huge and crushing. The mounting pressure the sound is subjected to when the lower register comes into play somehow speaks of the remorseless memory wipes Tallinn is undergoing, especially in the area this sound artist has chosen to document, the Kopli peninsula. The track is a truly hypnotising one, at first progressing from being an aimless, rootless presence to a static, unyielding slab of noise. Through the gradual introduction of a lower register and a number of well placed echoing thuds, the track also acts as a conduit for a number of deep, fast-moving currents. These elements join forces at the end to seal the fate of the piece, the increase in pressure and narrowing of the range forcing whatever decision is being made to the surface. This high pressure moment also, somehow, lets the listener realise that a number of emotions, signalled by deep-lying, slow-moving chordal and melodic progressions have been at play all along. This is a clever non-statement that pivots on these subtle layers of pressure, that also mirrors the stealthy process of the building’s metamorphosis from factory to “creative hub”. ‘Põhjala Factory’ reflects Tallinn’s Janus-like headspace perfectly. 

Maarja Nuut’s regular wanderings just across the road in Kopli are captured in a piece about one of her favourite spots, ‘Kopli Kase Park’. Nuut’s continued interest in weaving the sound of her voice and breathing patterns through simple folk-based snippets of melody, to find a hidden path to our souls, finds another expression here. Again the action feels distanced, slightly offstage and crepuscular.  Laughing children and samples of crows cawing appear intermittently, as do the lapping rhythms of the waves rolling in from the nearby Baltic. And there is what I would guess to be a faint, rumbling, echo of the legendary secret night railway that runs to the Kopli dockyards. It’s a trademark attempt by Nuut to fuse where she is emotionally and physically by using the most fleeting of means. 

Argo Vals’ ‘Noblessner Tower’ pays homage to a structure in an area that has seen an awful lot of renovation in the last 5 years. The old water tower can be found on Tööstuse 46, right next to Kalamaja park. This renovated building with its preserved exterior and modern internal refurbishment finds echoes literally down the road, with the imposing Põhjala Brewery & Tap Room, resplendent in its renovated state, and the crazy Temple of Dance just opposite, known as HALL. The Tööstuse - a busy road where trucks thunder down - is a demarcation line between a number of districts such as Noblessner and Kalamaja, and the liminal, hip-but-not-quite-there postcodes that back onto Telliskivi. The whole area is undergoing radical change. Vals’ track with its bitty rhythms and electronic counterpoints speaks of the new ambitions that have invaded the area. The cut up snatches of melodic trills and splashes also seem to speak of the brash confidence and hope, and also the inbuilt transience and fashion-based impermanence of these new enterprises. Whether we should view all of these developments as bad or good things is, though this clever music’s deft prompting, left open to debate.

[The Tower at Noblessner with Musicity x TAB 2019 Live Event]

One of the most intriguing tracks here is Sander Molder’s ‘Arsenal’. If you didn't know the source of his inspiration you would think this was a New Age paean to some water spirit; the rhythms and structures and samples [what could be drops of water, coins, windchimes] redolent of the hippy-trippy opening track of the [pre-Kraftwerk] Organisation LP from 1970. The piece moves through a number of guises: a piano starts to create some structure through a repeated stab of a phrase that constantly falls away in the face of a more undulating melody. It’s hard to fully categorise, but, to draw on another German reference, the music ends up in a vaguely ecstatic, kosmische state, a bit like Popol Vuh’s meditative 1974 LP, Einsjäger und Siebenjäger. What is remarkable is Molder’s admission that the tinkling effects are inspired by “the sonic beauty of a cinematic scene of hundreds of bullet casings falling and crystallising over time”. The Arsenal was a huge complex that served the arming of the Imperial Russian army from the rimes of Peter the Great until the fall of the Romanovs. It kept its military purpose until 2012, which makes Molder’s manifestation all the more remarkable.  

The seaplane harbour, now ever popular Maritime Museum [with the submarine you can wander round, and the extremely odd wooden Russian “underwater conveyance” that dates from the Crimean War] is captured by Taavi Tulev’s 9-minute “minimal epic”, ‘Noblessner Pier [Noblessneri kai]’. The gloopy drops and squiggles, set off against a simple atonal backdrop brilliantly captures the strange stillness - broken only by the creaking of moored vessels - that still envelops this once deadly stretch of water, where going for a swim could be interpreted as an escape attempt. Tulev was intent on capturing the ever-present feeling of the sea in this part of town and by its sheer persistence, [9 minutes-odd of simple sonic depth charges and pulses], the area’s eerie calm, and power, is well captured. 
   
Then we have Mart Avi, a modern pop soul boy and producer, whose worldview is a singular one, often running in parallel with current Estonian avant-garde and popular music. Avi normally creates smooth slabs of C22nd pop music. This sound-mapping of the Noblessner Foundry, once a place where submarines were built, is not what his devotees would expect. But the listener is reminded that Avi has a remarkable skill in making grand baroque pronouncements out of whatever material is to hand. Taking a literary cue and looking to the outside world for inspiration, Avi cites Jules Verne as the first writer to write about submarines as a subject fit for science fiction. By doing so he sends his track away from the welding stations and sliptows and into the ether, courtesy of a glorious, gloopy melodic interval which pops up twice, allowing the rest of the track to amble about in space and come to rest where it wishes. Here Avi also invokes the restlessness and wanderlust that is also part of the Estonian character. Still: Avi’s ‘Noblessner Foundry’ is not the sort of music that many would associate him with.

These tracks of Tallinn mark what, exactly? Tallinn? The city has doubtless moved on, to be flirting with us in a new guise when the current state of stasis is over. In any case, removing the place from the original grid reference into your own orbit can only cause more [pleasant] confusion. In case the lines aren’t blurred enough between what you hear and imagine [despite the best intentions of the artists themselves], more Estonian trickery can be added here, courtesy of yet another book I was given in the city, called Out Of Sync, Looking Back at the History of Sound Art, a publication which accompanied a major exhibition at the KUMU [Museum of Art] in leafy Kadriorg. In an essay on the Lithuanian-manufactured radio, the Minija 2, sound artist Sven Vabar talks of listening in to a programme called Looduse aabits, where an old character called “Uncle Jüssi” would bark out some indecipherable phrase or two that captured the young Vabar’s imagination. Years later, Vabar was preparing an installation that drew on his childhood experiences, specifically based around radio. In searching for the snippets he could stitch together to make a new memory, Vabar once again stumbled across a recording of Uncle Jüssi scolding his audience, which turned out to be “the playful call of a male willow grouse”.  Of such things are new worlds made.