Acting Local and Thinking Curated

TALLINN - This summer, the Weekend Festival came to the coastal Estonian town of Parnu. Calvin Harris, David Guetta, and other mainstays of the global EDM (Electronic Dance Music) scene performed live sets in front of one of the largest crowds ever witnessed in the south-Estonian resort. However, the future may not only be mega-festivals. Something very exciting has been happening for a number of years in Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania: musical talent is being given a chance to grow and develop through a series of innovative venues that give new sounds the perfect environment in which to be heard. The future of Baltic music, it would appear, is both gigantic, and also small and curated. It just depends where you look.

It was a visit to the Soundrive showcase festival in Gdansk, Poland that cemented the idea of change being underway. At the B90 venue, in the middle of Gdansk docks, where the Solidarity movement had begun under Lech Walesa, and next to a dance class calling itself “Solidarity of Salsa,” was a showcase festival and conference, with new acts from Poland, the UK, and western Europe entertaining the crowds on three purpose-built stages, and a music conference taking place in the cavernous convention hall. While the festival’s music was inspiring in many ways, so too was the panel discussion.

At the conference on the first night of the festival, the discussion centred around the best way for Baltic music acts to be promoted internationally. Present were Victor and Zivile Diawara, the husband-and-wife duo responsible for Loftas, one of the new, smart, live-music venues opening in Vilnius. Starting in 2010, which in Lithuania was “crisis time,” as Zivile explained, the couple wanted to provide the kind of space that had not hitherto been available. “There were mostly posh clubs, theaters, arenas or bars. There were no stable places for upcoming music. We had big gigs with well-known acts like Depeche Mode,  Elton John, Bryan Adams and so on, or one-off initiatives.”

“The idea was to open a multi-functional cultural venue, to create the platform for an artist to show onstage what’s next. We wanted to become the most active cultural institution in Lithuania, become one of the main players in the music event, festival and conference-organising field. We also hoped to start the renaissance of the Uptown area, a post-industrial urban area in the upper part of Newtown [a district of Vilnius].” Loftas began small, but has gained a reputation for providing quality music in a comfortable setting, which seems to be a fun place to go, but also to inspire responsible and considerate behaviour from the audience.

Accomplishing similar aims, but in a totally different way, is the Labadaba festival that was staged in Ratnieki, near Sigulda, Latvia, between Jul. 31 and Aug. 2. The festival, like Loftas, looks to provide a forum for new music. “We choose smaller labels because of the festival’s philosophy. We try to stay unique. The festival is held in a nature park, in protected territory, so we try to be as much as possible aware of the environment,” said Kristine Pinkule, from the festival’s organising team.

“We adhere to nature conservation principles by being one of the cleanest public events in Europe. It is possible because of the limited number of visitors. So that’s why we choose to work with smaller and local labels. If we invite major labels, the more visitors could come and that is not our aim.” This might be the first time a festival organiser has talked about wanting to keep visitor numbers low. It’s an unconventional approach to a live music event, but it follows a theme: a localised, curated approach to live music and to music promotion.

For Pinkule, changes are happening slowly in Latvia. “Because the market is really small, the financial situation is not so good, and also the Latvian population continues to shrink. And our small population leads to smaller budgets for artists.”
“But generations change, and there are lots of new artists that appear onstage. These days, musical genres and public attention are really divided. The main problem with new artists is that they have only a few original songs and there isn’t much to play in longer concerts. It seems we’re slowly moving towards a situation where there won’t be any need for albums, it will be enough to have one single that can be used to promote the band at concerts and festivals.”

Zivile Diawara agreed that change rarely happens quickly in the world of live music, saying that the problem was not ambition, but the time needed to accomplish the scope of ambitions for Loftas. “For the moment, we’ve decided to consolidate, to put more attention into our core events like music showcases and the art festival Loftas Fest, the What’s Next conference for creative industries, the Uptown design market, and so on. We are not supported financially by the government, so all our growth is by the people, for the people. That means everything goes much slower than we would ideally like.”

While EDM may rule the roost for at least one weekend (or Weekend) a year on Parnu beach, the fertile music industry in the Baltic region is producing not only new and original sounds, but also venues for hearing and experiencing live music that we can all be proud of.