Tallinn Music Week, Estonia, April 4-7

Tallinn Music Week is a showcase and conference, crammed with performances and panels, but with a less specialised scope than most. Here we have metal, modern classical, hip-hop, jazz, techno and electroacoustic ambisonics, among many other subgenres. Themed nights are presented in different venues, mostly around the bristling cultural hub of Telliskivi, a converted factory zone. TMW is open to the public, thereby shorn of any music biz exclusivity. Usually, Tallinn is well into spring season during this festival, but a freak spell of weather drop-kicked the temperature and laid out the prodigious snowfall. Indoors, we melted.

Africa Now! at the Fotografiska gallery revolved around the modern sound of that continent. Guedra Guedra was one of the artists with whom your scribe was already familiar, turning out to be a powerful highlight. Initially this Casablancan producer sounded quite traditionally techno, playing with directly trouncing hard-beat loop-repeats, but gradually he began to introduce samples of raw Saharan matter, group voices and double-reeded flute overload, pasting up a fast-evolving collage that started to edge into chaotic ritual abandonment. He controlled his intense upward curve of excitement admirably.

Earlier, Portugal’s Scúru Fitchádu was disappointing. Born of Angolan and Cape Verdean parents, his shouty rapping was delivered with an exaggerated physical vigour which suggested that his onstage sound was powerfully projected, but out front the audience was frustrated by a digital backing that was limp and lacklustre, completely lacking punch. Even his pair of live musicians sounded ineffective. When Guedra Guedra followed, it was a bass-sonics revelation.

Le Diable à Cinq (© Danja de Jonckheere)

It was another world at the Made in Canada evening, opening with Le Diable à Cinq, a wired-up bunch of Québécois stompers. They’re a directly communicating crew of entertainers, operating on a folk-plus level, with a guitarist who hunkers down like a furious metal riffmeister (on acoustic) and a fiddle/squeezebox team who both tap loudly on amplified wooden boards. The short-neck banjo sounds like a titanic axe. Towards the climax Diable overdid the crowd manipulations, but this combo’s general projection of exuberance, and unwatered folkishness, can’t be faulted, generally.

On a more specialised, old-fashioned folk front the Fenno-Ugria night at the F-Hoone bar concentrated on acts from the linguistic pool of Estonia, Finland and Hungary. The Estonian Cätlin Mägi is known for her electronic jaw harp soundscapes, but here she led her EstPipes, an expansive row of torupill (bagpipe) players who tamed their tones into a harmonious flow, in a lightly funking style. They also switched en masse to jaw harps, making call-and-response music from around a century ago. Then there was a group vocal arrangement, and a number that employed massed wooden flutes, which bizarrely sounded akin to the buzzing tones produced by Hukwe Zawose from Tanzania.