During the opening ceremony of Tallinn Music Week this past March, Toomas Hendrik Ilves was standing behind two turntables on a small platform, surrounded by 100 or so delegates, spinning Lou Reed and Bowie alongside cuts from his recent punk compilation. The scene resembled an awkward wedding disco—eerily anonymous reception hall, red wine in plastic cups, well-fed crowd beaming with expectation. The twist is that Ilves is the 62-year-old president of Estonia, the Baltic nation that gained independence from the Soviet Union in 1991. “Dancing is not forbidden here,” he half-joked to the unmoving crowd, once at the start of the set and again midway in.
The night before, Tallinn Music Week (TMW) held its opening party at Kultuurikatel, a renovated power plant just outside Tallinn’s central hub. Ilves again made an appearance, this time for an impromptu endorsement of Latvia’s Shipsea, who sounds like James Blake singing carols. Kultuurikatel’s checkered history and rapid development, as well as the president’s patronage, is emblematic of Tallinn’s fast rising cultural status, underscored by local band Ewert & the Two Dragons’ signing last year to Warner’s Sire imprint. Back in the ‘70s, Russian filmmaker Andrei Tarkovsky turned Kultuurikatel into the Zone, a spectacularly barren promised land in Stalker. (The director, rumor has it, contracted lung cancer drinking toxic water on set.) Two years ago, though already a key festival spot, the venue still looked relatively Zonal and decrepit. Since then, it’s faced a long survival struggle, from which it has gained investment and a future but lost much of its Tarkovskian allure.
Where festival-goers once wandered cold stone floors and sidestepped rusted fixtures, inspecting odd protrusions from the mold-speckled brickwork, they now line up for cloakrooms and gaze at the new corrugated ceiling, from which multicolored tassels dangle endearingly. Instead of a vast spartan enclosure, the refurbished Kultuurikatel has three showrooms—not including the new bean-bag area (seriously)—separated by elegant French doors. The president’s appearance was a fitting toast—not just to Shipsea but the festival itself, the cultural prosperity of post-Soviet Tallinn, a metropolis proudly integrated into the Western capitalist model.
Over three weeks in Tallinn, many young cynics informed me the president is powerless—"a figurehead,” I was often told. Whether or not that’s true (Estonia, it's worth noting, has a prime minister, Taavi Rõivas, who runs the government), it’s possible to see Ilves’ “rock’n’roll presidency” as the friendly face of a cultural Westernization project, following the economy’s example. That direction is not universally appreciated. “We’re becoming Nordic,” the local artist Maria Ader, who has exhibited at Kultuurikatel, told me one evening. She was standing in a smoking room with Raul Saaremets, a stalwart club and radio DJ, who shrunk into his cigarette as she held forth. Ader raised her voice over the music: “It’s fucking boring. We’re basically deleting everything interesting here. You can’t see Tallinn anymore."
The scene inside Kultuurikatel as Nils Gröndahl performs; photo by Mart Sepp.
The undercurrent of political discontent, particularly among artists, who are well-funded by the government, is a theme of my time here. A day after arriving, I met Estonian artist and musician Andres Lõo at a dusky Old Town bar. Locally, he is a notorious provocateur. In 2008, when he was in his late twenties, Lõo opened an art exhibition by launching a TV through the gallery window. The same year, he helped orchestrate the bombardment of a Klaxons concert with 20 kilograms of women’s underwear. As well as neo-Situationist events, he has a skill for darkly fantastic electropop. His duo Faun Racket, in which he sings in a doomy tenor pitched between Scott Walker and Jenny Hval, returned to this year’s TMW with a trove of new material and high aspirations.
When I got in touch, Lõo had insisted we meet that night. “Long hair, hungry eyes, Nordic blasé,” read his Facebook message. Twenty minutes later, he was seated opposite me at a dark corner table, speaking like an angry philosopher and scanning my eyes for recognition as he diagnosed the state of things via Joseph Beuys, Elon Musk, and developments in MDMA. He despairs of banal artists and dilettantes, of creative types in Nike trainers, he told me, and declared finally that “art is basically over—and not just because it's all the same, the ever-growing art market, the neoliberalist situation.” He continued: “The most reactionary part of contemporary art is politicized. The Goldsmiths school in London states that an artist can have more power by addressing gender equality, and so forth. But in my eyes, art is powerless, mostly. And they’ve derived the notion of research-based art, which is a great idea, but you need the time and money to research social issues. So it's obvious that art is not art anymore."
Lõo studied classical music at school and attended punk shows at night. In his teens, he began to experiment with music. “I was a typical loner, playing with cassette players, electronic equipment,” he said. He began to discover parties, a relatively new phenomenon in Estonia then. At first it was all “children of intellectuals or the elite of society,” he said, until sheer desperation kick-started a major electronic-music renaissance. “Anything at all was an escape,” Lõo added. “There was one good radio show, by one guy, and he played all the best music. And slowly people got enlightened."
That guy was Raul Saaremets, who met me one evening at an Old Town cocktail bar. As well as his radio show, Saaremets co-ran the legendary House of Rhythm/Mutant Disco parties with British DJ Chris Long, amassing disciples like Lõo with shows in Tallinn and Tartu. Saaremets’ background was in punk and post-punk, playing illegal shows under the noses of Soviet authorities. Asked if the music was politically motivated, he responded, “Everything was politically motivated! Everybody was against the communist rule. Even the adults. I'm sure amongst Russians there were some communists by heart. But I don't think I knew any Estonians who weren't against the regime."
Andres Lõo performing at TMW with his band Faun Racket; photo by Kristina Polka.
In countries like Poland, Soviet protest had hinged for decades on reform—a belief in communism, just not like this. By the ‘80s, many opposition groups promoting workers’ rights had been seduced by the Thatcherist model. In early-‘90s Estonia, the notion of social democracy alongside a strong welfare state was anathema to the new capitalist orthodoxy. With a 26 percent “flat tax” on all income, neoliberalism erupted suddenly, creating an impoverished underclass of the workless and elderly. Hungry entrepreneurs—including investors from the West—fed off Estonia’s new market.
Capitalism had an abrupt and peculiar effect on the ‘90s music scene. “It was a strange mixture of hopelessness and bad taste,” Lõo recalled grimly. “As if this whole generation lost integrity at once, trying to survive. A grotesque situation that went on for quite a while.” In the middle was Tallinn Music Week founder Helen Sildna. She spent the tail-end of the era working for BDG, the biggest promoter in the Baltics, helping synthpop bands like Depeche Mode discover sizeable eastern European fanbases. “With the first wave of capitalism, all the ugliness came in,” she told me. “Suddenly property had no ownership. Can you imagine that? So it wasn't necessarily the sharpest, wisest, most intelligent people who got hold of assets and properties. There were a lot of dodgy cash deals. Very messy times."
Around 2007, Sildna left BDG to promote a new wave of local bands. The following year, she founded Tallinn Music Week. Since then, an artistic community has blossomed, with areas such as Telliskivi—a low-rent art hub with several new venues—developing telltale craft beer and coffee hotspots. With support from the Telliskivi Cultural City project and a committee of genre-specialist programmers, TMW now attracts 30,000 festivalgoers—not bad, since casual visitors would recognize barely anyone on the bill.
Unsurprisingly, this year’s highlights were largely Estonian. Shitney, an anarchic trio led by jazz oddball Maria Faust, torpedoed rambling Animal Collective excursions with a barrage of livid sax and wild clarinet solos. Avarus Ensemble invoked curious orchestral epiphanies (think recent These New Puritans via Aerial-era Kate Bush), joined by a singer who conveyed dignity in trauma, in a voice like torn velvet. And at new Telliskivi venue Vaba Lava, the loop-pedal violinist Maarja Nuut found the seam between dada and Baltic folk, her gorgeous songs riven with bizarre allegorical interludes and click-clacking horse noises.
Maarja Nuut performing at TMW; photo by Agnes Aus.
Outside the festival bustle, Tallinn’s small, tight-knit scene is no less intriguing. Two days after Andres Lõo had notified me of art’s final death, we caught a basement show at MIMstuudio, a stuffy underground spot with a no-shoes, no-coats policy. (Slippers were provided.) A young crowd of rising producers, hip connoisseurs, and precocious composers was arranged on puffy cushions, whispering into one another’s ears and sipping cheap craft beer. While the venue, as well as Ekke and Motobor, who performed that night, are on the TMW program, much of tonight’s crowd lives beyond the scope of the festival. “The cool people hate Tallinn Music Week,” one popular DJ told me, tongue halfway in cheek. Every other weekend, he said, the festival clientele is “watching TV, and suddenly, once a year, they become a music fan.” It’d be unfair to expect TMW, now a national institution, to pander to the fringes any more than it already does. But to write off the “cool people” would overlook a real sense of skepticism in the city.
On Friday morning, before the presidential DJ set, Ilves delivered his opening speech to a packed auditorium. He preached a message of compassion and tolerance amid the European refugee crisis, which has challenged the EU to resettle hundreds of thousands of people displaced from war-torn surrounding countries. Ilves proudly likened the festival’s experimental streak to the open-minded attitude required to open borders. It was a stirring performance, with a questionable subtext: The Estonian government will take in a grand total of seven refugees.(The government says up to 550 places were offered, but only seven refugees have accepted so far.) The UN recently urged EU countries to take a further 300,000 Syrian refugees beyond the 179,000 already relocated, so needless to say, Estonia's share is quite small. Nevertheless, one populist paper, aggrieved by parliament’s liberal excess, ran a campaign characterizing the refugees as the “Seven Dwarves.” “The far right is coming stronger than ever,” Saaremets says. “When we have our next parliament elections, they're going to be very strong. And they are proper racists. With the immigration crisis now, the racism is phenomenal. I can't believe my eyes."
Though it's rarely obvious, a tension infuses the political dialogues here. At one point, it boiled over. After the president's DJ set (where, incidentally, a sidekick did most of the “DJing”), a rogue crowd member crossed paths with Ilves. Smirking broadly, he jeered, “As a DJ, even a lousy one, you are more popular than as a politician!” After a moment of stunned silence, the president, arm wrapped round his wife, shrugged, walked away, and smiled for a photo op with one of the lucky refugees.
Helen Sildna welcoming folks to TMW.
Many believe Helen Sildna, who sits on the president's think tank and possesses remarkable convivial élan, will one day take office herself. ("I hope not!” she laughed quickly, when the question was raised at the reception.) By day three, every journalist knows the Sildna Maneuver. In a crowded hall, she will catch your eye, grab your arm, lead you conspiratorially towards a huddled group—diplomats, DJs—and be deep into her next conversation before you’ve had time to scan their name badges.
In previous years, Sildna acted as Andres Lõo’s de facto promoter, sometimes commandeering special press convoys to his sets. This year, Faun Racket made a less populated appearance out at the Woodstock bar. If Lõo was put out, it didn’t show; at least, it was indistinct from his usual air of violated ambition. Part of his appeal is that, amid Tallinn’s digital-capitalist awakening, which has incubated a hive of twee entrepreneurs, he stands tall as a quixotic, principled adventurer. Of course, he is constantly thwarted—too globally minded for the local art scene, too ambitious to settle into the fringe, and yet attached to his outsider status in a way that precludes a real crossover bid.
For their Friday night set, Faun Racket looked like two distinguished actors returning to a cult movie set. Lõo, with his hefty leather jacket zipped to his Adam’s apple, performed with cartoonish gravitas, unleashing sky-punching flurries between comical exercise-routine strides. A clutch of dancers thrashed about near the stage. The new songs find glamor in fear and lust, with crescendos that possess few melodies and much violent repetition. “I was walking by the screens / Heroes, heroines, and shapes unreal,” he croons on one. As the last song fades, Lõo chuckles, then stares deep into the crowd, breathing heavily in and out of the mic.
After the flight home from Estonia, as London shone, I skipped the tube and took the 344 bus home. On the way, we passed Battersea Power Station, a faded industrial site with a fate immeasurably more disheartening than that of Estonian gentrification targets like Kultuurikatel. A sign touts a grand refurbishment to the scene once immortalized on the cover of Pink Floyd’s Animals: a hypermodern living complex, with industrial chimneys restored for period effect. “SHOP STAY EAT LIVE WORK and PLAY,” barks the tagline. As I scanned it, a woman the seat over followed my gaze. She read the billboard, glanced at the power station, and looked up with her son to appreciate the blue sky. Unbothered, she turned to face the road, as did I. We looked ahead together, with perfectly unbothered expressions, allowing the sights of the city to pass us by.
Correction: An earlier version of this article stated that Helen Sildna sits on a government think tank. In fact, she is part of the president’s think tank.