- A musician. The fact that I could also be an artist is something I didn’t find out till a few years ago, when I studied at the Academy of Arts in Tallinn. Music has accompanied me the whole time. I learnt percussion, vibraphone and xylophone as a child, and later experimented with different bands. Now I’ve ended up in the world of electronic music and am doing my solo project, Ars Intel. I think that’s a very logical development.

- For me it’s all connected anyway. On the outside, what connects them is the website www.looming.org, which I’ve been running for a few years with some friends. It’s intended as a platform for our various activities. “Looming” is the Estonian word for “creation”.

- Yes, my music is somehow partly about looking for a kind of ur-sound.

- People have always been looking for the Estonian sound. Choral singing is a big thing in Estonia, for example. In the future, I’d like to work more with voices in my music, too. Estonian art is often basically about national values. Estonia is a flat country, and not a rich one. So our pride is based on our long history. That's probably a very Nordic thing as well.
We’ve had influences from everywhere: from the north, from the west, and of course from Russia. But I think that, on the whole, Estonia is much more Nordic than it is Central or Eastern European.

- While we’re on the topic: what other mistaken prejudices can you think of?
That we drink a lot of vodka. When I went out here in Vienna, where I lived for three months now, and drank vodka instead of beer, people slapped me on the shoulder straightaway and said, “Of course, you’ll drink a lot of vodka, you’re Russian.” In Estonia we also have a vodka tradition, but it only goes back 200 or 300 years at the most. We are much closer to Finland than we are to Russia. With our language, too. The relationship between Estonians and Finns is like the one between Swedes and Norwegians. Somehow we understand each other. I have more difficulties with Hungarian.

- Estonia is actually very Western, you’d be amazed. At least that’s the feeling I had when I came to Vienna. It sounds strange, but Vienna feels to me like a bigger copy of Tallinn. A lot of people used to come from Moscow to Tallinn to breathe in the Western feeling; we had a freer atmosphere.

- They had to find their niche. A lot of people went over to animation and film. Estonian cartoons from the sixties to the eighties are unbelievably good because that’s where the best people were working. Then, from the eighties, you could watch Finnish television in Tallinn and the north, so there was information from the West coming in like that.

- Some people from the older generation haven’t coped with the change, unfortunately. That happened to people from my parents’ generation, who are now between 50 and 60 years old. But things have to change. In the eighties, most art from Estonia was pretty old-fashioned, to be honest, and somehow childish as well. Of course there were good people too, but the change was certainly a good thing.

- For the young generation it was really crazy. Everything developed very fast. Looking back, I’ll probably miss it, because things will never happen again as fast as they did at the start, and people will never be as enthusiastic again at parties as they were back then. Up to then, there had only been a few people who were able to travel abroad and bring back records. They were copied quickly and passed around, only among a small circle of people, mind you. And the first parties were more just gatherings of friends who met up somewhere to listen to this unbelievable new music, which completely blew their minds because it was so different. People in the West probably can’t understand enthusiasm like this, because they have never had this feeling. That first enthusiastic feeling when you heard Indie rock or early Dance records for the very first time - you start looking at the world with different eyes. That’s why most of the activists from the initial period are still at it today. They have seen heaven, their eyes have been opened, and now they are looking for a new heaven.

- Basically, the situation’s not all that bad. There isn’t much financial support, but projects can be started up easily. I can’t live from my stuff. I tried it until I was 25, but it was like a bad survival trip. Then I worked for an advertising agency for a few years. These days I try to combine everything. When I need money, I simply work a bit. And when you become better known and travel more, you earn a bit more for your projects. Even if you often hear afterwards that you got less than people from the West. But that’s another story altogether.