Swedish-Estonian musical experimenter and composer Tuulikki Bartosik has shared a new single from her forthcoming album Playscapes, due to be released digitally and on vinyl in October 2022. In his review of Bartosik’s 2016 album Storied Sounds, Thomas Blake noted there were “polskas and slängpolksas – dance tunes deeply indebted to the Scandinavian musical tradition. But there is also a welcome modernness at play too.” He concludes “…tradition means nothing without evolution. Storied Sounds encapsulates this concept with breathtaking simplicity and vibrancy.”
A lot has happened in the interim, the evolution touched on by Blake has grown wings. In her own words “My forthcoming album marks a new era in my music making, I intend not to hold any barriers in creating this new album and allow my inspiration to flow in every way it sees fit.”
While we maybe saw flickering embers of this growing in her previous music, the first two singles shared from her forthcoming Playscapes album hint at a freedom that is both beautifully experimental and deeply engaging. It is also our Song of the Day.
Notes on Reval: Pettäsaamislugu
Rather than Estonian, the title and lyrics are in the language of the Võrumaa region of South Estonia. Roughly translated as Reval, A Cheat Story, “Reval Pettäsaamislugu” intertwines its impressionistic words with rhythmic music reflecting the torment of not being able to reconcile one viewpoint with another. It is about how more than one thing can be right, even though they seem to oppose each other – is one idea a cheat, the other, or neither?
Tuulikki is always changing and evolving. She began as a musician drawing from the traditional, but her approach to composition and recording has transformed since her 2019 second album “Tempest In A Teapot” and 2021’s “Fýri” EP. “I still begin writing in a traditional way but then I improvise a lot,” she explains. “I record myself, then I begin taking the pieces I like and further compose from there to make a structure.” With Playscapes and its singles, she has arrived in a different territory to “Fýri”, which was recorded live in an outdoor setting.
On “Reval Pettäsaamislugu,” the accordion is there – but it creates rhythmic punctuation. Also heard is Estonian kannel, the zither-like instrument unique to the Finno-Ugric culture – but, again, it’s there for feel. A pen plucks its strings. What’s heard becomes part of the whole rather than a focus.
What Tuulikki instinctively invoked draws from her experiences as a child in a kindergarten also attended by other local kids from Russian families or with a Russian background. This was before independence when Estonia was still occupied by the USSR. “I had been told horrific stories about the Second World War by my grandparents, what the soldiers did – my grandfather was in prison,” explains Tuulikki. “My mother would not recommend me play with them but I established my own relationship with the Russian speaking children at kindergarten. I had to think for myself. And recently with Russia there has been so much cooking in the background all the time, and now it has heartbreakingly come to the surface. It’s a really delicate thing to think about how I grew up.”
Conflicting emotions are never easy and by meeting them head-on Tuulikki, of course, cannot arrive at anything cut-and-dried. “Reval Pettäsaamislugu” evokes irresolvable internal conflict – where we are now, set against where we were. Where Tuulikki is now, and where she was.
Also from the past, Reval is the old name of Estonia’s capital city Tallinn. Tuulikki chose it because when the name was in use the city was an international place of trade, a melting pot where anyone from anywhere found their place.
The same applies to the title Playscapes. “It’s a free place, where I can play without any limits, without anyone telling anyone what to do,” says Tuulikki of the album’s title. “During the occupation in Estonia you weren’t free in your thoughts, as I child I remember living with the sense ‘do they know what you are thinking?’”
This is what “Reval Pettäsaamislugu” is about – expressing difficult, connected but divergent thoughts. How could it be otherwise in the unrestricted world of the Playscape.
You can buy the track via Bandcamp: https://tuulikkibartosik.bandcamp.com/