Margo Kõlar: the sound mystery Hunti jooksmas (Becoming a Wolf, 2024, premiere) springs from the idea of man escaping from reality into the eerie but liberating world of the Estonian national animal.

Paul Beaudoin recently returned from Varanasi, India, where he completed an artist residency at the Alice Boner Institute, delving into Nada Yoga, the Sanskrit philosophy of sound. His latest composition, Dhvani (meaning ‘sound’ in Sanskrit), reflects this immersion. Incorporating a large singing bowl, the piece generates ethereal sounds without direct contact with an object, echoing the essence of Nada Yoga. ‘Dhvani’ resonates with Estonian Music Days 2024 theme ‘Umwelt’ and invites listeners to explore inner vibrations. Beaudoin’s interdisciplinary approach, influenced by his background as a visual and video artist, infuses his compositions with a unique blend of sonic and visual elements, forming an ongoing series titled ‘Soundfields’. In these works, musicians craft a sonic canvas akin to painters using colour.

Yakamoz (2024, premiere). Doris Hallmägi: ‘Yakamoz’ means the glistening of water in Turkish. For me this word is more familiar as the name of a submarine. The piece sprang from the sound of a clavinet and from moving back and forth, repetitions, recognitions, predictability and unfamiliarity – just like an instrument may be new or old, the repetitive movements in a current predictable and yet not at all.

Jakob Juhkam: Little Night Music (2024, premiere) is dedicated to all companions and people on the other side of the wall who have to listen to electronic music in its process of creation in an entirely non-electronic way.

Mirror Maze Mind (2024, premiere).

The Brain – is wider than the Sky –
For – put them side by side –
The one the other will contain
With ease – and You – beside.
(Emily Dickinson)

Markus Robam’s Clockworks (2024, premiere) invites listeners to an enigmatic world of temporal resonance. Inspired by the sensitivities of our bodies’ internal clocks, the composition delves into the dance of biological clocks that guide our existence. Robam invites performers to accept the insecurity of time, letting every musical segment mirror the unpredictable rhythms of life. The composition unravels in ten movements, from the ritual “Chronicle” to the etude-like “Journey”, every movement opening a window into the delicate balance of temporal chaos and order. 

The instrumentation of the piece has not been specified, giving musicians the freedom to carve their own soundscape where the borders between the organic and the synthetic are vague. With no specific instruments, the music invites musicians to accept the unfamiliar, experiment with electronic textures, freely chosen samples and other elements by shaping a unique world of sound guided only by the internal rhythms of the composition itself. Clockworks is a metaphor for the unpredictable waves and currents that we encounter in life. A composition that mirrors the flow of temporal experience.

Movements: 1. Chronicle 2. Resonance, 3. Lull, 4. Sync, 5. Genetic cadence, 6. Harmony, 7. Dose, 8. Rhythm, 9. Shift, 10. Journey.

Andrus Kallastu: In the interdisciplinary surrealist music workshop of Pärnu Modern Music Days 2024 ‘Surrealism and Music’, the mousikē-performance Keemiseni viidud ajupudru (Brain Porridge Brought to a Boil) explores the boundaries of creative fields, styles and eras. The surrealist techniques of ‘exquisite corpse’ (cadavre exquis) and ‘entoptic graphomania’ (la graphomanie entopique) made it possible to automatically obtain the set of images underlying the work and their sequence in the spirit of surrealism. The word mousikē from ancient Greek culture, as a genre definition of a work, refers to a union of song, dance and word that delights all muses. The collaborators are Andrus Kallastu, Gerhard Lock, Hans-Gunter Lock, Indrek Palu, Jaan Malin, Kai Kallastu, Kenneth Flak, Külli Roosna and Leonora Palu.