Following appearances at Tallinn Music Week and across Estonia, Australian-Estonian artist Olev Muska has returned from a five-week tour of vocal performances, academic engagements and creative projects.
You may remember Olev’s successful Estonia and Latvia concert tour last year, followed by a coveted recognition award and grant from the Estonian Cultural Endowment (Kultuurkapital) and the Estonian Music Council for his outstanding contribution to Estonian music.
Invited by the Fenno-Ugria Society to perform at the renowned Tallinn Music Week festival and Tartu’s Genialistide Klubi, independent label Glitch Please released an LP — My Mouth Sang, My Heart Sank — featuring Olev’s electronic reimaginings of Veljo Tormis’ arrangements of folk songs from Estonia’s kindred Balto-Finnic cultures, to coincide with the event.
The vinyl release comes in four colour editions — blue, black, white, and blue-black-white — with a pressing run of 508 copies, the number eight marking 108 years since Estonia’s declaration of independence.
Glitch Please label boss Karl Korts again arranged a comprehensive itinerary. Other appearances included concerts in Võru, Palamuse, Kadrina, Rapla and Pärnu, as well as record listening evenings at Myra Studios in Viljandi and Terminal Records in Tallinn. Olev also performed sets aboard the Tallink ferry travelling both to and from Helsinki.
At the Estonian Academy of Music and Theatre (EMTA), as part of the Commute festival, Olev gave a talk on his approach to audio-visual composition and performance. He also contributed to the adjudication of multimedia students’ final works, alongside a screening of one of his own audio-visual creations, Woodland Whispers, at the Sõpruse cinema.
At the House of the Blackheads (Mustpeade Maja), as part of Estonian Music Days (Eesti Muusika Päevad), he performed a one-hour set of original material and joined a panel discussion on the topic “Children of the Diaspora — in search of an imagined homeland”.
Olev is now fostering several new collaborations with artists in Estonia, including folk-flute duo Kuula Hetke, with whom he performed while providing live video backdrops. Further projects are planned for November in Toronto, followed by another return to Estonia in early 2027.
Read more
https://www.olevmuska.com.au
https://www.instagram.com/olevmuska
https://www.glitchplease.ee
