World Inverted

Estonian fiddler, composer and singer Maarja Nuut has been a favourite in these parts since her 2016 album Une Meeles was a Top of the World in #119. We dubbed her the ‘Baltic Björk’ and the album won her a nomination in the Songlines Music Awards. The follow-up, 2018’s Muunduja (‘Shifting’ in Estonian) was recorded with the sound artist/engineer Ruum (aka Hendrik Kaljujärv) and earned another four-star review. On World Inverted Nuut and Ruum’s sonic fusion of ethereal folklore and abstract electronic soundscapes takes another leap into an unimagined future.

This time round only three tracks have lyrics, including a setting of a WB Yeats poem on ‘Cloths of Heaven’, but Nuut’s voice haunts the record, with or without words. The beats are perhaps less fierce and dreamier than we heard on Muunduja, yet they’re somehow bolder, too, as ambient textures, hazy pastoral washes of sound and quiet but insistent techno grooves ebb and flow. Mysterious but warm, innocent yet ominous, meditative but dynamic, this is an album of rich and glorious contrasts, which seems to reveal something new every time you listen.