Tallinn

experimental pop

[trustinlovemusic]

(Trust in Love)

[xtallinnx]

Trust in Love presents the Under the Covers series.

Carefully selecting tracks from 3 important musical influences on her work, she covers songs that were originally produced as solos to re-contextualize them into duets.

These personal professions and confessions of love are then shifted into a new space of dialogue.

Lamentations of heartbreak and narrations of desire now flow between these conceived lovers, companions, partners in the crimes of love in her series. What is created is a tension that opens up the listener to the vulnerability of a lovers’ discourse.

Trust in Love collaborates with Zoom Lens’ textural pop artist Tallinn, for this second entry of her series, as they cover New Order’s Mr. Disco released in 1989 on the Technique album.

I collaborated with the great Trust in Love on some emotional dancefloor memories :')

[deadblog12345]

Zoom Lens 1 Week Cyber Sale! [11.25 - 12.02]

Store • $5 CDs, Tapes, Shirts + More http://zoomlenslabel.storenvy.com/

Full Digital Discography • 60% Off (~$1 Each Release) https://zoomlens.bandcamp.com/

Making way for / funding new releases for 2016! Thanks for all the support. 

[xtallinnx]

Special Economic Zone tapes are on sale for only $7! Check it out + help ZL stay strong in 2016

[if-you-fan-a-fire]

November 7, 2015: another episode of The Anatomy Lesson at 11pm EST on CFRC 101.9 FM (cfrcradio). New music from Nailbiter, Micachu and the Shapes, Eschaton, Exhaustion, Thus Owls, Tallinn (ghostoutfit), some classics from Silvia, Deviation Social, André de Saint-Obin, Portishead, another great tape from Ascetic House and more. You’ll likely be out and about, but remember to listen on the radio, stream or download the finished show here by selecting the date and time.  Thus Owls - “Black Matter” Black Matter Portishead - “Machine Gun” Third (2008) Nailbiter - “Moon” Formats Silvia - “Mata Hari” Silvia (1982) Tallinn - “Return to the Abraham Mosque” Special Economic Zone Boucane - “No Center” No Center Micachu and the Shapes - “Oh Baby” Good Sad Happy Bad Sylvia Monnier - “Self Portrait II” Betta Splendens Scandinavian Star - “Untitled 4” Scandinavian Star André de Saint-Obin - “My Burning Head” Sound on Sound (1983) Exhaustion - “Phased Out (Mikey Young Remix)” Phased Out Eschaton - “37 Marion / Beamer Falls” ∆ Deviation Social - “Reality / Imagination” From Beginning to End, 1982-85

[xtallinnx]

Tallinn on the radio last night in beautiful Kingston, Ontario!

[xtallinnx]

TALLINN LIVE!

October 23rd, 8PM

Babycastles, 137 West 14th Street, NYC

Facebook event: https://www.facebook.com/events/100660270294822/

We're playing with our friends Trust in Love / @trustinlovemusic​ and Odd Rumblings. If you're in New York it'd be great to see you there!

[deadblog12345]

Tallinn Special Economic Zone [ZL-27]

Tallinn is the New York-based experimental project of Scott Whittaker. Tallinn’s album Special Economic Zone takes place at the intersection of virtual and real in the globalized cultural marketplace.  Mediated and mistranslated by the Internet, foreign pop idols and romanticized geographies echo through a landscape of commodity and ruin. To that end, Special Economic Zone possesses a rich musical diversity: baritone shoegazed post-punk and power electronics are set against deteriorated J-Pop samples, Cambodian propaganda karaoke, and cosmopolitan field recordings. The musical language is direct, yet found in translation.

-Limited To 60 Hand-Numbered Copies -Hand-dubbed Cassette Tape -Foreign Air Mail Envelope w/ Zoom Lens Insignia -3 Randomly Selected 4x6 Photos Shot By Tallinn -1 Randomly Selected Defunct Bank Note -Lyrics Sheet -Zoom Lens Sticker       

Download / Stream/ Purchase Cassette Here: https://zoomlens.bandcamp.com/album/special-economic-zone-zl-27                         

[deadblog12345]

Tallinn “Return to the Abraham Mosque“ off Special Economic Zone

Release: 8.27.15

[tinymixtapes]

Premiere: Tallinn - “Return To The Abraham Mosque”

Typically, it’s good measure to do two things in the beginning of the fall so shit gets prepared for the cold weather to come (those of us that DO experience this shrill). First thing you gotta do is have a plan to be ultra productive: start a project, schedule each weekend according to the weather, work out like a maniac, and generally muster up an energy that is productive/active. Second is start listening to the bluest jams, lyrically and/or sonically. Guess who’s helping you activate this mindset? Zoom Lens? You’re the best, Chocolate Grind reader! And on the feels-mending is Tallinn, with a wooze that’s easy to apply within any situation. Especially running. Think about it listening to “Return To The Abraham Mosque.” Actually, thinking about it aside from running, but contextually with the title – and not really paying close attention to lyrics (which I think are describing the Mosque details? or not about it at all?) – “Return To The Abraham Mosque” just picture the teen-made ironic local-backwoods mosque to Abraham; stumbling upon crudely rudimentary effigies and probably drug paraphernalia, but mostly beer cans/bottles, hearing distant singing or fingers taping or maybe it’s the cellphone towers clanging

Running relieves so much tension and stress, and if your one who gets bummed out the sky is dark at 4PM or hate the cold, taking all that rage out physically, pumping your heart and lungs and legs whilst Tallinn rings out, your patience might stretch as the sound and composure of “Return To The Abraham Mosque” swirls with the fading sun. It also reminds me of a lot of the 1997 Alt-Rock tunes I’d listen to on the bus going to middle school via a low-battery Walkman just as everyone started smelling the death of earth’s foliage.

This August 27 (FUCKING THURSDAY!!!), Zoom Lens is pimpin’ Tallinn’s newest release Special Economic Zone, which to quote the label:

” It’s definitely one of the more challenging records throughout Zoom Lens’ discography, but I think it sets the stage for a lot more experimental and left-field projects to come, so I thought it would be something of interest to TMT’s readership.”

STOKED FOR EVERYTHING, ESPECIALLY THURSDAY!

• Tallinn: https://soundcloud.com/xtallinnx • Zoom Lens: http://zoom-lens.org http://j.mp/1hbrjUA

[meishismile]

[ghostoutfit]

1. Slipknot- (SIC) 2. goreshit- loli fantasy 3. Cherryboy Function- City To City 4. toe- 向こう岸が視る夢 5. Makiko Hirohashi- 雨上がりの空に (Edit) 6. Yūko Imada- The Blue Sky [Zoom Lens] 7. DJ TECHNORCH- アイシネコマタ 8. Kanye West- I Am A God (Edit) 9. Tallinn- My Negative Approach 2 [Unreleased / Zoom Lens] 10. Loli Ripe- All I wanna do is touch your power points 11. Hanatarash- boat people hate fuck 12. KoRn- Good God (Nightcore) 13. Uio Loi- Avocado Shake (Shako-Pani Remix) 14. LLLL- Drowned Fish [Zoom Lens] 15. Tears For Fears- Pale Shelter (Edit) 16. Plaster Cast- Pussy Cat [Zoom Lens] 17. Kikiyama- Numbers World (Yume Nikki OST) 18. Marilyn Manson- I Don’t Like The Drugs But The Drugs Like Me (Live Intro) 19. サイケアウツ- GODOPA 20. Chu Ishikawa- Dinosauroid (Tetsuo: The Iron Man OST) 21. Boredoms- GO!!!!!

I contributed a mix to one of my favorite publications The FADER. It’s a rather fitting view inside my head. I also talk about my forthcoming album …belong, a childhood KoRn story and how growing up as an Asian American has effected the perception of my label ZOOM LENS and the opinions I have towards the current trend of East Asian culture.

Full interview here: http://www.thefader.com/2015/05/21/fader-mix-meishi-smile-interview

Exciting news: my band Tallinn is releasing new music soon! The first preview is playing at the Fader as part of Meishi Smile’s amazing mix. Definitely proud to be on the same label as someone who’d put Hanatarash and KoRn back-to-back. Can’t wait to share more with you soon!

[ghostoutfit]

Why Tallinn?

My band’s name started out arbitrarily enough, but after living with it for the past year (!) it’s grown on me more and more.

When I was beginning work on the project my ideas were a little more conceptual than Expatriate turned out. There were two things I was particularly interested in exploring — sampling “inauthentic” music from other countries and contrasting high and low recording fidelity — to create something that was geographically and sonically ambiguous. The music would sound “foreign” but at the same time be about how that foreignness was created. (This theme is much more prominent on the next EP, which you’ll be hearing more about soon.)

I also originally wanted to have economics songs narrated by some kind of rootless flâneur character, one of the “people who live nowhere” in this Matt Taibbi quote that serves as the epigraph to Chris Kraus’s “Kelly Lake Store”:

[…] all of those political clichés are quaint relics of a less threatening era that is now part of our past, or soon will be. The next conflict defining us all is much more unnerving.

That conflict will be between people who live somewhere, and people who live nowhere. It will be between people who consider themselves citizens of actual countries, to which they have patriotic allegiance, and people to whom nations are meaningless, who live in a stateless global archipelago of privilege — a collection of private schools, tax havens and gated residential communities with little or no connection to the outside world.

(I ended up basically chopping this but you can still see the remnants of this idea scattered around Expatriate, like the place and time corresponding to each song in the book edition.)

A city name seemed like it’d fit perfectly with these themes; as long as I can remember I’ve loved the idea of bands named after places without particularly liking any of those bands. Reading about Tallinn, a place I’ve never been, I imagined that narrator walking alone around the wintry city, thinking about austerity economics, and at once it seemed like everything made sense.

[ghostoutfit]

Visit Original Link

I’m very excited to say that I’m just about to finish the second record from my band, Tallinn. Here’s a very short, teasing excerpt from one of the songs, about mistranslation and displacement: you’ll hear my electric guitar, processed to sound a little like Oval’s clicking hum, and computer-synthesized phonemes generated algorithmically by Mumbley, a (slightly-modified) program written by Brandon Lucia from recent favorites Netcat. I hope you enjoy it!

[xtallinnx]

New Tallinn music is on its way soon!

[xtallinnx]

Exciting news: "My Negative Approach" from Expatriate is featured in the Quietus' Writers Tracks of 2013. It's an honour!

Expatriate by Tallinn

[xtallinnx]

This is the image on the back cover of the physical CD of Expatriate — an abandoned hotel in Cairo, damaged by time and glitched digital mediation.

[ghostoutfit]

One of the most remarked-upon elements of W.G. Sebald’s style are the images within the text of his novels. In The Emigrants, the narrator relates his travels as he attempts to reconstruct the lives of four Germans exiled in the early years of the twentieth century. As he traces through the past, reading journals or speaking to friends or relatives, his voice is always present. This style emphasizes how, for Sebald, history is simultaneously omnipresent and at an unknowable distance — while its effects cascade throughout characters’ lives, it can only be comprehended at a remove, mediated by unreliable sources.

[xtallinnx]

I wrote this last year when I read The Emigrants; I’m reblogging it to write a little about "Sebald's Death", a Tallinn song I wrote thinking about some similar ideas.

Expatriate by Tallinn

In Sebald’s novels, photographs document the past while simultaneously documenting our dissipating relation to it. From the moment the photograph is taken, it becomes more and more unknowable. But when Sebald died — stricken by aneurysm while driving on the motorway through Norfolk — I imagine that when the car kept moving it too was memory made manifest, like an old photograph in which nobody still living can name the faces.

The whole of Expatriate is obsessed with mediation, and when I think about mediation in a musical context I think about aestheticizing recording fidelity. It’s a technique which makes the distance between the musician and the listener strikingly apparent. But on this song in particular I wasn’t interested in just using low-fidelity to put this separation in the foreground. Instead, I wanted the music to collapse the lo-fi/hi-fi binary into a sense of ambivalence — the immediacy of a photograph but also its sense of distance.

There are only two guitar tracks on this recording. One is in pin-sharp high-fidelity, but is processed into an an alien shimmer not unlike Loren Connors’ recent live sound; the other one is performed unplugged, but recorded so poorly it becomes a granular roar. I sing when it drops out, frozen in time.

[xtallinnx]

Here are some pictures of the physical release of Expatriate, which you can pick up at http://xtallinnx.bandcamp.com/. The album comes in a forty-page book with cream-coloured pages — each song has lyrics, a piece of visual art, and an associated location, somewhere in the world.

[xtallinnx]

Visit Original Link

"Mishima's Death" is from Expatriate, the first album by Tallinn. For its narrator, the illusion of beauty is tantalizingly close in a swarm of glitching string samples — until it collapses forever, in a roar of clipping noise and prickly modernist guitar.

You can listen to the rest of Expatriate or buy a physical copy — packaged in a beautiful forty-page book — at http://xtallinnx.bandcamp.com. Thanks for listening!