Zombie folk and the talharpa: Estonia's Puuluup rocks an ancient instrument in new ways at Mission Folk Music Festival
Duo uses loopers and percussive techniques to create driving rhythms
Marko Veisson and Ramo Teder are Puuluup.
Mission Folk Music Festival presents Puuluup on July 23 and 24.
ESTONIAN DUO Puuluup playfully dub their style of music “zombie folk”—a term that immediately brings to mind Night of the Living Dead costumes and lyrics about eating brains.
The reality is a lot more compelling, though equally fun.
What musician-singers Ramo Teder and Marko Veisson have resurrected is actually an almost-lost Scandinavian-Nordic instrument called the talharpa. The four-stringed, boxlike bowed lyre dates back hundreds of years; for the past century its use has largely been relegated to remote islands of Estonia and parts of Finland. When Teder and Veisson first heard the instrument, separately, a decade and a half ago, they were instantly drawn to the unique and haunting sound that resonates through the talharpa’s wood box via horsehair strings.
The wooden, box-shaped talharpas.
The two finally crossed paths in the small world of Nordic talharpa playing, and now they’ve reimagined the antique instrument, putting it to new and hypnotically rhythmic use, via bows, loopers, percussion, and plucking. That’s all set off by the layered and weirdly mesmerizing harmonizations of their voices—Veisson’s rumbling bass and Teder’s higher warbling strains. (“Puu” is Estonian and Finnish for tree or wood, and “luup” is a play on the English “loop”.)
In short, they’ve almost singlehandedly revived the nearly dead talharpa in the coolest way possible.
“Now it’s living again, but we use electronics and the sound of Puuluup is not the traditional talharpa; it’s something different,” Veisson says over a Zoom call with Teder. The pair has just finished an open-air concert in the small Estonian city of Tartu, and befitting a zombie discussion, it’s the middle of the night. Teder is patched in over his car phone and you can’t see him on the screen, but Veisson is already home and on video call; suiting the mood, you can barely make out his large, bearded figure lurking in the dark. The latter continues in the same dry humour that typifies the insanely watchable Puuluup: “It’s like, if somebody dies and comes back, you can see the same person, but they’re walking a little differently. It’s just this very cool instrument to play. The traditional playing had died out, so there was this intrigue.”
“Also I love the playing technique, which is very weird, mostly using the backsides of the fingers,” Teder adds. “I was playing bass guitar and flute before, but I simply fell in love with this instrument.”
(For the full layered effect of the pair’s mashup of old and new, check out the video for their single “Liigutage vastu” at bottom; in it, they wield the age-old instrument alongside loopers and microphones while rocking out in a living room.)
It somehow also fits that they sing in a language that diverges from the usual human vocabulary as well. When the duo inevitably sends the dance pit into a frenzy at this year’s Mission Folk Music Festival, as they have at festivals all over Europe this summer, the Canadians who are listening might assume they’re just singing in Estonian. But that would be too straightforward for this duo who loves to upend forms.
“There is a lot of made up words, and there is a lot of Estonian language,” explains Veisson. “Yes, there are some proper lyrics, but we prefer to have this playful attitude; during every performance we improvise a lot with the text. What we like to say is: ‘What’s most important for us is the meaning.’ You could say it’s a made-up language or you can say maybe it’s just a language that doesn’t exist yet. But mostly it’s just the feeling or emotion you want to express.”
When you can translate the words, the two are apparently singing about everything from Polish TV heroes to wind turbines to a neighbour’s nasty dog. For the best tunes, they’ve made surreal, deadpan music videos—most notably for the rollicking “Paala jarve vaala bar”, seen in the video above, with its glowing-pink bottle of Paala vaala, and a femme-fatale-punk bartender.
The pair—the Nordic-blond Teder and the dark, tall Veisson—are the perfect, straight-faced stars of those videos, not to mention onstage, where they never seem to stand still. But are they really trying to be offbeat-funny? Check them out at Mission Fest and judge for yourselves.
“We don’t take ourselves seriously,” allows the straight-faced Veisson. “Maybe it’s more like we don’t mean to be funny, but we are.”
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