Tanya Tagaq Live - Exotic Folk Tradition Spiced With The Avant-Garde

Inuit throat singer Tanya Tagaq's live performance in Kumu served to prove two. First, exotic type of folk music and avant-garde experimentalism can be amazingly compatible. Second, that the power of music lies beyond convenient labeling.

The avant-garde composers and performers have always looked towards the folk traditions to create, in a seemingly ironic way, something new and exciting. For example, minimalist composers have often adapted the principles of Eastern music for their own conceptions. Avant-garde vocalists have often used their voice as an instrument rather than a tool to convey message. Tagaq's throat singing technique proved that voice-as-an-instrument approach stretches back to the legacy of archaic folk music.

Also, the entire concert was based on improvisation between Tagaq and Michael Red (electronics) and Kenton Loewen (drums). Improv and avant-garde have often gone hand in hand. Then again, folk music can also rely on improvisation very well. In short, the merger of folk tradition and the avant-garde seemed logical and natural in Tanya Tagaq's performance.

Even though according to the presskit Tagaq was said to blend the northern aborigenes throat singing with the indie-rock, such labelling seems misleading. Not only that the indie as such is a rather vague stylistic term by nature, but also because there actually were no elements in the performed music that one could associate with indie rock as an idiom understood in a certain way.

Rather, Michael Red's walls of sounds referred to the manifestations of the more cerebral kind of electronica (musique concrete, ambient, glitch, IDM) and Loewen's drumming spectre encompassed Jaki Liebezeit's hypno-grooving, Tony Williams' free-jazz touch as well as Chris Cutler's sonic conceptions (he used a violin bow on a cymbal, for instance).

Therefore, the power of music does not depend on stylistic frontiers or labels. However, it is found in sounds. And also performance, which was fantastic. Even if during the quieter parts Red and Loewen's accompaniment may have seemed a bit random, Tagaq still held attention with her impressive vocal technique.

The more intense parts however sounded almost danceable and hypnotic and in Tagaq's body movement on stage there was some sexual animistic suggestiveness.

For the "encore", they improvised again: it began with a melodic singing which proved that Tagaq can also sing quite beautifully without special tricks and it culminated with an interplay built on an even dancier rhythm. In summary, it was an exciting, new kind of concert music.

Lars Horntveth - Kaleidoscopic

Lars Horntveth is the leader and multi-instrumentalist of a Norwegian ten-member electrojazz/post-rock/mini-bigband Jaga Jazzist. Kaleidoscopic is his solo album, where he performs with a drummer as well as members of Latvian National Symphony Orchestra, playing a long, continuous 37 minute composition. In this magnum opus one can discern less jazzy influences as could be expected of his main gig. The jazziest element is clearly Horntveth's bass clarinet work. Otherwise the composer combines influences from Bernard Herrmann style classicism (also referring to Steve Reich occasionally) as well as bedroom electronica and even folk, considering a section led by acoustic guitar towards the end. What we have is an interesting synthesis of classicism, orchestration and modern alternative music directions. Kaleidoscopic is a composition worth listening from beginning to end and it is also confirmation that Horntveth is one of the most forward thinking avatars of our current day progressive music scene.

Phantom Band - Checkmate Savage

Phantom Band is a new indie band from Glasgow, Scotland, that initially kept a low profile under other names. Their debut album as Phantom Band is produced by Paul Savage who is primarily known by the legendary Scottish indie group Delgados. The Phantom Band performs a rather rocking, with slight Scottish folk tinge, but nonetheless slightly experimental indie-rock wherein it is telling that the band is heavily influenced by Neu!. The sextet's songwriting skills are pretty good. What is more impressive is that the band can take their longer songs and make them not only capable of sustaining interest but even the highlights of the album, which is a great skill. "The Howling" is epic kraut-pop at its best, "Crocodile" a bold instrumental kraut-jam, "Island" visits the gospel folk paths a la Brightblack Morning Light and "The Whole Is On My Side" as an album closer is a fine slab of the best kind of avant-pop. A commendable debut album.

Fennesz - The Black Sea

Austrian electronic musician Fennesz is arguably one of the most famous glitch-tronic artists, who has, combining guitars with laptop, created compositions where one can discern melodic beauty under the layers of clicks and cuts and white noise. It is the re-contextualization of melody under the digitally manipulated noise that made Endless Summer (2001) as one of the undisputed classics of the decade. This opus sounded like a pop album for the experimental electronica crowd. Even though the new album still features guitar as an easily recognizable element, The Black Sea is more ambient in nature. The pieces are longer, three of them over eight minutes. They, particularly the ten-minute title track, seem almost classical in construction. The album closer "Saffron Revolution" sounds quite transcendent. Not exactly the best Fennesz album, but nonetheless Fennesz has flair in his field.

Animal Collective - Merriweather Post Pavilion

American avant garde group Animal Collective, who also performed a memorable gig in Tallinn a couple of years ago, is one of the main acts associated with the nascense of the so-called freak-folk trend during the last decade. One can certainly note the folky tendencies on the album Sung Tongs (2004), that indeed presented the bold and crazy animal collective at its most acoustic.

At its most simplified one can say that with its crazy eccentricity, shamanic suggestion and spirited affinity to nature, Animal Collective does embody everything that is both idiosyncratically charming as well as overblown and self-important in freak-folk. Then again, AC is too eclectic to fit in to any stylistic limitations as implied by a "scene". They've covered a wide territory actually, from neo-psychedelia and progressive folk to krautrock and noise-pop.
Merriweather Post Pavilion, the band's ninth studio-album, demonstrates that these post-modern neo-hippies as critical darlings have reached to the phase of electronic dance music. Merriweather Post Pavilion itself is a concert venue in the USA, that the band members have particularly fond memories from the childhood, that they've tried to put into their music here as well. AC recorded this album as a trio (of Avey Tare, Panda Bear and Geologist), given that Deakin took time off from the band.

Does MPP imply that AC has gone techno? It would be a sin to represent this album in such an oversimplified manner. It's true that the band's already hypnosuggestive motorik groove is now fed by drum machines and sequences and thus the myth of AC as archetypal freak-folkies is now apparently shattered for good. Otherwise, Collective has stilistically stayed true to their trademark psychedelic atmospheres and the overabundant multilayered nature of their arrangements. And actually the more prominent electronic elements simply underscore the notion that the trademark AC style and the basic essence of electronica are very compatible.

Certainly, MPP is one of the most accessible AC albums. That the songs longer than six minutes are now gone is but one fact to demonstrate it. The same band, who could put fifteen minute jams on the record earlier on. Some of the tunes, "Brothersport" actually have some kind of a "hit" potential.

Still the style of AC is so dense that it remains challenging to the conventional listener. This is still not easy listening. MPP, in its own way, is even more avant-garde than previous albums. It's a great art and challenge to condense ideas into a shorter format that are all too tempting to be expressed during 20 minutes as is the usual wont of experimental musicians. Animal Collective has risen up to the challenge well and delivered their most subtle record to date.

Megan Quartet - Roadside Picnic

Megan Quartet, led by Tarvo-Kaspar Toome, performed actively up to 2000, blending psychedelia, free-jazz and fusion as well as improvisation and experimentation already at the late 1990s, before other Estonian bands such as Phlox, BF, Luarvik Luarvik et al began playing in similar style. Even though acts like Phlox have developed this kind of a post-fusion sound in even more exciting directions, MQ's third album Roadside Picnic (Estonian for "Väljasõit Rohelisse") is nonetheless a worthwhile record. Since this record includes more professional jazz musicians than could be expected from the latter post-fusion bands (bassist Mihkel Mälgand, Aulis Nemvalts on saxes and even guitarist Iljo Toming for one cut), I expected a slightly more drier and scholastic approach. Actually the record sounds more interesting than much of conventional jazz-rock. In terms of dymanics, development and juxtaposition of textures, the interplay is masterful, but diverting and tasteful. For the fans of the MKDK scene in Estonia, Roadside Picnic is a priceless historical document.

Max Tundra - Parallax Error Beheads You

Parallax Error Beheads You, third album by British electronic musician Max Tundra, is a fascinating listening. This is more than can be said about most music having pretenses for the title "experimental electronica". Even though it is increasingly more difficult (if not already impossible) to create something truly new in electronic music, it is still possible to have a fresh approach. Tundra, who does not even possess avantgardist pretensions, creates music that I would use the following epithet about it: eccentric electronica. Tundra assumes the role of a British eccentric who combines pop melodies, dance beats and the dense, multilayered nature of IDM to create songs full of childlike playfulness, absurdist juxtapositions and charming naivete. Songs like "Witch Song" could easily be pop hits, but the joke would still be on the mainstream pop listener. Whereas tunes like "Nord Lead Three" and "Entertainment" are crazy stylistic maneuvers while "Until We Die" is an unbelievable synth-prog parody that has got to be heard to be believed.