Next single from my forthcoming album Playscapes is out! Released by myself on my label Efni Records, this song continues to open up the new soundscape of the forthcoming album.
I love to make music in the nature, to record myself in the forest and play together with the birds but my new single Reval: Pettäsaamislugu/Reval: A Cheating Story takes us to the colder and harsher city environment.
The moments when you feel overwhelmed, helpless, scared, rejected, threatened, worried, weak and nervous, humiliated, bitter, mad, disrespected, violated and ridiculed are staying much longer in our systems than the moments of joy and laughter, success, confidence, empowerment and happiness or when we feel courageous, confident, proud, accepted, free and optimistic. There is nothing as precious as the current moment we are living in because we cannot change the past and we cannot predict the future. Everything can change in the blink of an eye.
I recorded the song in the middle of the city of Tallinn working together with Estonian producer Sander Mölder. I am not usually singing with text or writing texts nowadays but for this particular tune it felt essential to do so. The lyrics were born in the moments before I began singing in the studio. I didn’t decide on the Võro language, it happened spontaneously. I grew up partly in Võrumaa with my Võro speaking grandparents and I was suddenly looking at a story of myself, like another person. I have actually never experienced that before, it was scary. As I speak six European languages plus Võro language, it is always a bit hard to choose the language in some occasions but I have noticed that in those moments the language chooses me.
"Võro is a language belonging to the Finnic branch of the Uralic languages. Traditionally, it has been considered a dialect of the South Estonian dialect group of the Estonian language, but nowadays it has its own literary standard and is in search of official recognition as an indigenous regional language of Estonia."
Võro Instituut is an institution which stands for the culture and language of South Estonia. If you feel like you want to know more about this indigenous culture, you are welcome to contact them.
Tulli kavvõlt üle mere kodo manu käümä
üten latsõ' miis ja pilli', kaasa võtsõ kalli
Tahtsõ vahtsõ tarõ tetä' jõõ veere pääle
Vinne miis tulľ õkvalt petmä, ulli muudu võlsma
Kuis tuu lugu edesi lätt, kiäki viil ei tiiä'
mõtõľ esä, mõtõľ imä, mõtli' sõbra' hüvä'
Kas saa kuri uma palga, uma' vitsa' kätte
Tarõ kambri' kõrda säetü', akna' ette pantu'.
Siim Mäesalu mixed and mastered the result.
The cover is a fragment of Kristi Kongi's painting “Pimeduse ja valguse piiril”/"On the border of darkness and light" graphical design by Piret Parrest.
Many thanks to the whole team Kristel Kolkanen, Sander Mölder, Siim Mäesalu, Kristi Kongi, Piret Parrest and Merli Vajakas.
INTERNATIONAL PRESS RELEASE
“Reval Pettäsaamislugu” is the new single from Swedish-Estonian musical experimenter and composer Tuulikki Bartosik. Taken from her forthcoming third album Playscapes, it is issued through digital platforms on 2nd of May 2022. Playscapes is released digitally and on a vinyl in October 2022.
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 a 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?
It’s not surprising this interplay is integral to “Reval Pettäsaamislugu.” 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. And from Tempest In A Teapot too, where she created an orchestra with her accordion.
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.
The allusive lyrics were written spontaneously during the music was recorded. “They were born in the moments before I began singing,” she reveals. “I didn’t decide on the Võru language, it happened spontaneously. I grew up partly in Võrumaa and I was suddenly looking at a story of myself, like another person. I had never experienced that before, it was scary.”
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 a 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 Playscapes.