MAARJA NUUT & RUUM
with special guest Aphir 

Estonian folk-tronica duo Maarja Nuut and Ruum are headed to our shores for their inaugural Australian tour and will be performing at Howler in Melbourne on Thursday 7 March with special guest APHIR as well as appearances at Womadelaide and Womad New Zealand.

The sound of Maarja Nuut and Ruum is the velvet clash of disparate voices from a shared cultural heritage colliding. Nuut is a vocalist and violinist with a love for the old traditional songs of her homeland, while Ruum– whose birth name is Hendrik Kaljujärv – has favoured electronic music since his earliest musical forays.

Yet when creating in unison, the shared aesthetic of Maarja Nuut and Ruum forges a beguiling musical interzone: connecting the deep-rooted, intuitive worldview of days past with the hyper-mediated realities and seemingly limitless technological possibilities of the present and future.

Having been drawn together in the summer of 2016 to concoct a collaborative piece for the Viljandi Folk Music Festival, Maarja Nuut and Ruum soon discovered a strong musical bond continually pulling them together, a creative spark which dragged them from both from their respective comfort zones.

“In this collaboration we both bring in our sound tools and musical thinking to the process,” Maarja Nuut offers. “Then each complements the other in their own ways. It’s been a long process finding the balance, but I love the fact we both have space to express ourselves and somehow in the end these different worlds come together as something rather natural.”

The culmination of this strange-but-perfect union was 2018’s acclaimed debut collaborative album Muunduja, a remarkable, often stimulating listen which The Quietus called, “one of the year’s most beautiful journeys through inner and outer space.”

With Maarja Nuut utilising violin, looper, vocal experiments and keyboard to capture her inner narratives and Ruum providing an abstract and mysterious electronic framework, their upcoming shows in Melbourne and Sydney promise to be as cerebrally confronting as they are entrancing.

maarjanuut.com / facebook.com/MaarjaNuutEst / twitter.com/maarjanuut