9. Tuulikki Bartosik‘Põhjarannik’
A friend played this to me at a party in that magical period between Christmas and New Year where you can be your worst self and no one will judge you for it. It came on – I feel like it might’ve been on a PJ Harvey curated playlist that my friend had heard – but either way, it found its way to me. I think I may have read a bit about the artist around then and I discovered it’s Estonian.
I felt like Tuulikki was calling from the same place I’m calling from. In a way there are similarities with ‘Friend Forest’, but it’s just done entirely acoustically with very natural sounding treatments and also on a sheer technical level, the mix is just extraordinary. The placement of all the sounds is quite mind blowing. It feels like you have this archaic machinery that is generating something that feels like a ray of sunshine. It feels like this one part is happening because this machinery is in place doing this thing, then that one part creates the other, and that’s the concept I’ve been fascinated by for years. There is a feeling, not like one musician has layered a sound on another, but that one sound has allowed another to exist, like one has grown out of the other entirely organically without any thought. I always strive to do that and it’s because of music like this. There’s something about that that just gets me.
