The 8th TMW festival in the heart of Estonia has offered a spectrum of genre-breaking acts, from thrash metal to indie-electro-pop beats
April 4, 2016
One of the largest music and urban culture festivals in Eastern Europe, Tallinn Music Week, took place in the capital of Estonia March 28 through April 3. The annual event, ranked among Top 5 spring music festivals in Europe by The Guardian, ran for the 8th time and proved it has gotten bigger than ever: almost 240 artists performed at various city locations over the course of five days, and over 1000 music industry delegates joined the event. Many of the music media representatives came all the way down from the US, Western and Central Europe and even Australia.
The music part of the festival program kicked off with a grand opening night at a highly peculiar art center Kultuurikatel (Cultural Boiler), which owes its gloomy industrial interior and “sound-friendly” high ceilings to the fact that it is hosted within the walls of the actual water power plant, which supplied the country with water since 1913 before it closed down and transformed into a creative hub. At the opening event festival goers had a wide variety of young artists and genres to check out live. The next morning, the official opening speech from the Estonian president, Toomas Hendrik Ilves, gave a formal start to the extensive cultural marathon.
The festival went on with separate concerts, uniting artists by music genres on the widest spectrum: metal, electro, funk, folk, hip-hop and more. The metal showcase brought onstage Finnish thrash metal gems Mokoma and St1mina, and Danish dirty-metal act Helhorse, alongside Russian solid alt-rockers Psychea and Ukrainian crossover alternative dance/nu-disco pioneers Cherokey.
Besides traditional music venues of festival nights, TMW dared to explore creative and previsouly idle locations during the daytime. For instance, Estonian Song contest winner Jüri Pootsmann, a promising young voice predicted to possibly win Eurovision 2016, gave a 30-minute concert… on the public tram number 4. Meanwhile, an up-and-rising local indie-electro-pop artist NOËP, who has more than 3 million listens on Spotify, gathered a large crowd of fans on the hill of the city’s medieval Old Town, melting the chilly cloudy day in Northern European capital, where the spring is arriving quite late this year. And Apollo book store transformed for a couple of days into a cosy city stage in the center of the book universe, presenting Australian indie-pop-rockers The Elliots and local electro pop / post-rock band I Wear* Experiment.
By tradition, the festival also included a two-day conference, hosting debating panels with competent speakers from a large palette of music industry. The topics for discussion at this year’s conference were, for example, music supervising, intelligent branding, fundraising and DIY style, digital single market and the business around the song and touring. In addition, music experts elaborated on such undying questions as how to write a good song, choose the right background music for the film and whether young audiences need to be educated about classical music. This year’s “under threat” topic, titled ‘Is album review dead?’ came to an optimistic conclusion that it reviews have always been there and should not be discarded.
Music shows and the extensive conference were not the only dishes on the program menu. Those who had an opinion on the issues in music and culture could take part in or listen to a series of City Talks, where serious art-related debates took place. How to deal with music in political conflict zones? Should alcohol be excluded from all rock concerts? These and other themes were in the spotlight of public debates.
The flavor to the festival days was added by a TMW Tastes program for gourmets and an instantly sold-out Tallinn Craft Beer Weekend, the largest international craft beer event in the Baltic region. And those who craved for live music, food, drinks, shopping and relaxed atmosphere all in one could explore the hub of Tallinn’s creativity, historical Telliskivi district with plenty of cafes and bars with international cuisine and pop-up handcrafts stores, launched specifically for this occasion.
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