Tallinn Music Week, Estonia, May 11-13

Tallinn Music Week teeters very carefully between an open-to-the-public festival and a music biz event that also includes a daytime panel/talks conference. The only way we can perceive its showcase intentions is that most sets are only between 30 and 45 minutes duration, presented in multiple venues around the city, with promoters, record labels or other festivals running themed nights for their artists. This produces a certain high energy sense of improvisation, as we attendees combine known enthusiasms with the urge to discover unknown talent.

Over its three days, the showcase part of TMW featured two venues with programmes of interest to Songlines readers. The Club Of Different Rooms offered the Fenno-Ugria Night, Africa Now! and a Viljandi Folk Festival takeover, on three separate evenings. F-Hoone welcomed the regular Folktronica stage.

Mari Kalkun is poised to release her first album on Real World Records, Stories Of Stonia, and presented her new stripped-back mode during the Fenno-Ugria Night. This involves being able to leave most of her large instrument collection at home, when touring, concentrating on her kannel (Estonian zither) and an M-Audio sampling keyboard. Despite feeling shaky about the fresh set-up, Kalkun sounded as masterful as usual, stacking up her vocals above a churchy undertow, while bowing her kannel strings. This exposed format works well, and will be even further honed by the time Kalkun tours, including a set at WOMAD in July.

Straight afterwards, the Finnish duo Hurja Halla mixed vocals, cello, end-blown flute and jaw harp, moving from the vigorous to the sharply sparse. Also the same night, a move to the F-Hoone bar found the Estonian singer-keyboardist Ingrid Lukas serenading her born-again Pagan fairy-folk brethren. She and her multi-national band live in Zurich, cultivating a curious blend of folk, prog, electronica and spiritual healing. 'Analogue Connections' should be a hit single, with its slow anthem adhesiveness, Lukas tending to pervert pop mellowness into a slightly strange form. She gets folks dancing on the walkways, provoking slippery near-ludicrous moves. Lukas could be massive in the world of the hippy avant garde.

Back in Different Rooms, during Friday’s Africa Now! sequence, the Ugandan percussion trio of Arsenal Mikebe caught the night’s peak crowd, inflaming all with their sharp combination of sonic bombast and detailed subtlety. Despite this sweaty intensity, they choose to wear shirts and suits, closely facing each other, rattling timbale-style drums, and clanging a particularly large cowbell. The bass beats roll deeply, and the shifts in emphasis display a kind of organic mechanoid precision, as the metallic skitters increase.

To start Saturday, the Swedish-Estonian accordionist Tuulikki Bartosik provided a rare instance of folk being present on a non-specialised stage, playing a duo set at the Fotografiska gallery with electronicist Sander Mölder. Your scribe had caught Bartosik before, solo and acoustic, so this evocative soundscape approach marked a significant change, both players in pursuit of environmental sculpting, with added field recording atmospheres.

Different Rooms once again won out on the global music front, during its Viljandi presentation, this folkfest being the Estonian equivalent of WOMAD, usually taking place on the same last weekend of July. The live set of Spanish singer and nyckelharpa player Ana Alcaide was slightly disappointing in comparison to her full-band recordings, as she mixed originals with ancient Sephardic songs. Accompanied by laptop, bouzouki and occasional fiddle, Alcaide’s vocals were undeniably powerful, but the musical backing sounded quite limp compared with the latest album’s spread.

The Estonian duo of Leik doubled on fiddles and voices, again mixing originals with old folk chestnuts. Both of them enjoyed playing in pizzicato or ukulele style, but at other times they were smooth and harmonious. This was a strong run, with Monsieur Doumani up next, taking Cypriot tradition and warping it via a clearly open background of external genre navigations. The trio’s line-up remains electric lute, trombone and acoustic guitar, with effects trimmings all around. Percussive momentum is provided by group clapping, and the combined vocals also possess rhythmic power. Doumani included a new instrumental intended for the next album, not titled yet, its slow stomp generating a frisson of excitement which got the audience standing. When the trombone slurs, and the lute gets prickly, this must be 'Pissouri', with its bent-note cascade.

Even though Doumani technically provided the climactic set, a hearty shout-out should go to Dumai Dunai, a patchwork crew from Montréal, specialising in a Balkan repertoire. Natalia Telentso pens her songs in Ukrainian, but with co-singer Eli Camilo there are also lines written in Serbian, French and English. Fronting a loaded posse of trumpet, trombone, alto saxophone, guitar, bass and drums, this is an intelligent partying kind of a band.