POSTIMEES (THE POSTMAN) is Estonia's oldest daily newspaper

KIRI-UU – CREAK-WHOOSH / STROOM / 2021

RECORD OF THE WEEK > How to make sense of homeland far from the homeland

Olev Muska finds that music will always remain music and sound always sound, regardless of the era, instruments and makers.

Margus Haav

9 July 2021

Sydney-born Olev Muska does not want to carry a title other than Olev Muska. He has described himself as a multimedia artist, educator and creative producer who promotes innovation, excellence and fun. Multitalent-experimentalist Olev Muska is also a historian and archivist, whose curiosity along the axis of time extends both forward and back.

Kiri-uu was a 12-member collective he created, and 'Creak-Whoosh', released by a Belgian record company, includes a selection from their debut album. Re-releasing the previous material and assembling it into a new selection is fashionable and fully justified. Kiri-uu's 19-track debut album was released in 1988 and is currently a very expensive rarity.

'Creak-Whoosh' contains only nine remastered songs, including Muska's first solo album hit 'Tšimmairuudiralla'. There is certainly something in this material that still attracts both local and global audiences today, and this album, along with Muska himself, has just found its way into the columns of the prestigious magazine Wire.

In a foreign country and on a foreign distant continent, deciphering the perception of homeland of the ancestors is, of course, in itself an undertaking. Olev Muska's 'Old Estonian Waltzes', released in the land of the koalas in 1985, was the first record of Estonian electronic folk music. Electronics already offered quite unlimited possibilities at that time - and, so, where would you get a 'kannel' (Estonian zither) from anyway, even if you wanted to. Until the first timid attempts to cross electronics and tradition in Estonia, a good quarter of a century remained.

If Muska himself has attracted attention in his very innovative albums, with a particularly good sense of style and humor when combining analog electronics with folk music, this time it should not be forgotten that the 12-member Kiri-uu was a choir. The choir sings choral music, of course. Tormis, Ingrian and Votian songs. Electronics feature strongly here as well, but this time the main part is given over to the human voice as the oldest instrument.

The result is what the influential music site Boomkat described as a combination of Arvo Pärt, Ryuichi Sakamoto / YMO and Visible Cloaks. Just as Muska's own Estotronics is clearly different from what was and is being done in Estonia, so too is the case with this choral music.

Muska first heard of Tormis from a Melodija record in the early 1970s, and he has repeatedly described how profoundly it affected him. Kiri-uu is capable of presenting familiar images in its pleasantly mystical expatriate Estonian sensibility, which is something different to what native Estonians would be familiar with, and this cosy but sometimes threatening atmosphere gives strong added value to the material.

5/5

MÜÜRILEHT (THE RAMPART RAG) is a publication reflecting Estonian contemporary culture and thought, advocating for an open and diversity-friendly society

KIRI-UU – CREAK-WHOOSH / STROOM / 2021

OLEV MUSKA KIRI-UU GLIDES ALONG SMOOTHLY AS AN ALDER SLED 40 YEARS ON

Lauri Tikerpe

16 June 2021

When I once took folklore as an elective in university, I was at great pains to regard it as exciting. For the narrow ear of a hardened indie-pop worshipper, folk songs seemed a bit woolly. I couldn't see them in the way that Australian-born Estonian magical ethnoelectronicist Olev Muska and the ensemble Kiri-uu he created could.

"Creak-whoosh", released in Belgium, contains a selection of tracks from Kiri-uu's 1988 debut album. Olev Muska and Mihkel Tartu slap Veljo Tormis on the back and spread out a variegated and richly nuanced folktronica rug. On the A-side of the vinyl EP opalesces one of Olev Muska's chef-d'oeuvres 'Tšimmairuudiralla', which originates from Muska's 1985 solo debut, yet glides along smoothly as an alder sled almost 40 years on. Who would have thought that a favourite student rant 'Once there lived a miller in a mill' could become such a powerful lo-fi electro banger with a half-gibberish child's vocal and psychedelic synth surge.

The B-side of the EP, however, sucks us into the hypnosis of a postapocalyptic village choir. Initially, repeated snippets of melody have a somnolent effect, but the darker and more fatal sub-currents quietly sound the alarm and don't allow a blanket to be drawn over the vigilant eye. That's how, for example, 'Lullaby' sounds, remembered from childhood, which has been passed through a scratchy distortion unit and set against the backdrop of a darkening forest. But at the same time, 'Beautiful Girl on a Swing' is full of sweet sadness and summer promises.

If music is our memory, then Olev Muska's creations should not be forgotten. Just as he has not forgotten his ancestral souls.

5 stars