Live From Tallinn: Eggvn, Oranssi Pazuzu & The Tallinn Ensemble For New Music

Eggvn
Kino Maja
April 19, 2025

Just on the perimeter of the Estonian capital's mystical Old Town, your scribe chanced upon the Tallinn Industrial Festival, a long evening that offered one of its most curious acts right at the beginning. Fortunate not to be missed, as an early arrival was for once the justified course. This is a Mexican duo called Eggvn (apparently their names are IV and V), hidden under large hornéd masks. Nay, complete head-coverings, entire bovine skulls in place, clad in 'keep-off' blackness, and gutturally vocalising along with a dreadnaught rumble of electro-noise amassment. Initially, they were not sufficiently loud enough for this mode of aural assault, but the speaker stack feedings were gradually adjusted, and the sonic weight soon increased.

Kino Maja looks like a more mainstream haunt, for weekend cocktails and partying, rather than a grubby, warehouse hole suitable for throbbing industrial metal and/or electronics. Most of the other outfits on the programme appeared set on an almost self-parodic, post mild-metal set of diluted pulsing, perhaps overly dramatic in the semi-goth sense, so this opening shot of Eggvn was very satisfying, as the pair explored a spikier terrain of doom-mongering, guitars and synths sutured together into a single pulsating entity. Sonics deepened into a suffocating crush. At times, they got into a hard Giorgio Moroder-type Euro-beat, stripped and struggling against their human captors, kickin' and complainin,' their "Pray To The Devil" climaxing the set with a full-on pummeling.

Sated by Satanic industrialism, your scribe moved centrally, to the Old Town's main square, where squats Mad Murphy's, ostensibly an Irish pub, but also welcoming a good range of local Estonian alternative beers. It is also a music haunt, with free admission for popular combos, cultivating a partying vibration. This night, there were Stereotypes, a rockin' covers outfit with a primarily good taste in classic rock and post-punk material. It was particularly impressive that they successfully tackled "Psycho Killer," courtesy of Talking Heads. Not a song often found on the tribute circuit. Plus, some Iggy Pop-pers. The band included Kino, a seemingly Japanese expatriate on trumpet and keyboards, sighted several times on the jazz scene at Philly Joe's Jazz Bar, with the remaining members sounding distinctly like English imports. The only horrid drawback was the inclusion of a clutch of songs from the 1990s UK scene, probably one of the worst times for 'popular' beat music in that otherwise bountiful rockaboogie land.

Oranssi Pazuzu
Paavli Kultuurivabrik
April 24, 2025

For the mightiest in beat music, we hit the outskirts of the city, under bombardment by Oranssi Pazuzu, a return to high volume doom at one of Tallinn's most recently opened venues. It is kind of like the bastard offspring of the much-missed Sveta Baar, with a similar booking strategy, angled towards rock's most unusual, imaginative and extreme acts. Your scribe has been casting his peepers towards Oranssi Pazuzu for around half a decade, slowly spinning their Finnish collection of releases, mostly available on the excellent Svart label. This was the first opportunity to view these Helsinki ear-hurters in the mist-cloaked flesh, basking in a minimalist blue lightshow, barely visible until the colours became more changeable during what was a substantial set of growing dread. Together for almost two decades, this band came across as a collective, although Jun-His's lead vocals were almost continually dominant, cast in the depth-quake guttural bass range, words not really discernible. A spread of guitarists changed their ascendancy, in the name of group climaxing which rarely let up, with one member, Evill, concentrating on a bank of electronics, contributing greatly to the multiple drapes of environmental drone-matter. Lights and sonics enmeshed to produce a slowly shifting physical slug-weight of noise-evolution. Despite their heavy onslaught, this was an outfit with a perversely sensitive palette, delivering much variation within their baseline sludge emissions.

The Tallinn Ensemble For New Music
Fotografiska
April 27, 2025

Estonian Music Days is dedicated to moderne classical sounds, embracing the acoustic and the electric, frequently linked in togetherness. This smaller gig at the Fotografiska gallery ground-floor space represented a much more intimate situation than the more crowded events for the Jazzkaar festival. The Tallinn Ensemble For New Music (formed in 2012) assembled a programme that held a complete linear unity, developing via smaller groupings up to the full complement, and also investigating a slow curve up from acoustic chamber loneliness to pieces where deft electronics cloaked the music with a subtle veil.

Conductor Arash Yazdani guided a complement of players with flute, clarinet, violin, viola, cello and double bass, although the combined sound did not always inhabit the chamber sphere, due to the added electronic elements. The members all wore black, with white upward-pointing arrows on their t-shirts. The first half of the concert emphasized works that highlighted flute and viola, sparse in nature, while the second phase opened out into an ensemble substance, with the last three of the six pieces (all premieres, by Maria Rostovtseva, Paul Beaudoin and Liisa Hirsch) complementing each other well, as if they had been selected for their overall characters. This deliberate programming structure facilitated a sense of conceptual continuity not so frequently found in such a concert's evolution.