Royal Welsh College Of Music & Drama, Cardiff
Fri 12 May
When you Google the country Estonia, their main contribution to singing at first seems to be as 2001’s Eurovision Song Contest winner, but that should be changing with musician Maarja Nuut gaining more worldwide recognition. The singer, who’s been called the ‘Baltic Björk’, had wanted to play the violin ever since she saw an orchestra on TV at the age of four. Taking up the instrument at seven, music continued to be her major study all through school.
After a few years with an international music project, she decided to strike out on her own with the aptly-titled record Soolo in 2013. Her latest release Une Meeles (In The Hold Of A Dream) continues with the mixing of centuries-old folk stories with modern electronic minimalism. She says, “Perhaps the strongest common denominator between my music and traditional music is that the axis remains but everything around it has to adapt and change to survive and remain current.”
Nuut uses looped music and vocals, and with her Runic chanting she’s like a mesmerizing shaman. Her work is mystical and eerie, evolking her homeland’s landscape of primeval forests, bogs, rivers and thousands of lakes and islands. Prepare to taken on a wild journey to past and present with the fiddler; as Duran Duran’s Simon Le Bon tweeted, “When angels sing they probably sound like this.”
Tickets: £12/£10. Info: 029 2039 1391