TMW2025 – Taiwan Music Flight

After too long letting it pass me by, I took advantage of this year’s Tallinn Music Week for the first time, starting off with a Thursday evening at Erinevate Tubade Klubi. I’ll confess uncertainty over what ETK was like, so the invitation to the Taiwan Music Flight and pre-show reception was a great opportunity to continue exploring Tallinn in ways I wouldn’t normally put myself out there. To my delight, it’s a gorgeous, spacious setting for a show, with a series of rooms running the length of the featured concert hall and granting the view of a gorgeous sunset over Kalamaja’s other side of the tracks. The “different rooms” promise continues into the concert space, with seating organised for the evening using clusters of living room sets, filling the massive hall with individually-cohesive arrangements with an overall mix-and-match cosiness – and plenty of room in front of the stage for dancing.

Before the show, however, was an opening reception for the evening, catered by locally-based Taiwanese food company Yi Ting – a nice chance to meet the artists in advance and enjoy Taiwanese delicacies. These included a pork bao I did not snag in time to try, a tasty “salad” of pickled veg both familiar and no, and an understated cupcake with delightfully surprising boba flourishes – there was an another dish that I simply don’t have the familiarity to describe, but that didn’t stop me from eating and enjoying it. Also enjoyable was spotting Estonian musicians who, much as the Taiwanese artists soon to take the stage, blend traditional, modern, and international sounds, such as Puuluup’s Ramo Teder.

The first act of the evening was educator and traditional instrumentalist Chung Ching Chen, whose sleeveless red suit gave her the necessary elbow room to move and hold her equally gorgeous instruments. Her set blended songs and styles, pulling from her training and experience worldwide to merge ancient instruments with Brazilian rhythms, creating tunes both meditative and danceable. Accompanied by a drummer and backing tracks, Chen’s plucked strings guided us through stories and sounds from her homeland and travels. Her talent and skill easily captured the room, introducing us to new sounds and expressions while warming us up for the rest of the performers.

The second group on stage was WOOONTA, a fabulously accomplished East Asian duo combining sitar and erhu for classic and modern sounds, mixed in with stories about their music and travels (including a too-relatable tale about discovering single-serving Estonian “cheese”). The sitar, exquisitely handled by Japanese-born, Taiwan-based Yo, was played with the spirit and energy of a rock guitar, and T.S. Lo’s remarkable bowing of the two-stringed erhu was an incredible introduction to this fascinating instrument. Although I don’t like to look at my phone out during a performance, I was definitely following them online before their set finished. (Full disclosure: Yo shares a mutual friend with this reviewer, and organised my entry without knowing a review would be forthcoming.)

Though the first two acts focused on traditional instruments and global arrangements, CHIH CHIH changed it up by bringing both vocals and absolute rockstar energy to the stage with an excellently-detailed suit, shifting easily between styles and energy. Chih-Yin Kuo’s voice is incredible, with range and timbre both haunting and invigorating in turns. A member of Taiwan’s indigenous Amis tribe, Kuo was supported by a fellow singer/songwriter and a percussionist in charge of drumming, chiming, and rattling the soundscapes and stories of Taitung into life. The performers took two acoustic guitars and hand-based percussion and turned out a marvelous fullness of sound, filling the hall and clearly having fun with it – sometimes at the audience’s expense.

The headlining act of the evening was the absolutely too-cool-to-be-real Outlet Drift, on one hand a classic three-piece rock band – guitar, bass, drumset – but it would take several other hands to hold all the wonderful madness they bring to the stage. Also repping the Amis tribe, their outfits were a vivid blend of materials and This is the point where the audience began to stand up, and the space in front of the stage, previously occupied by folks sitting to enjoy earlier sets, was finally turned into a dance floor. They brought such infectious energy from the moment they appeared that the audience almost surged to their feet. The set was packed with rocking, jazzy, wild songs that took unexpected turns and were utterly moveable. Described as a “psychedelic rock experiment” in their pre-show flyers, they delivered on that promise and then some.

The final set featured not a Taiwanese artist, but Estonian drummer and producer Tõnu Tubli of Trad.Attack! , who’s worked with artists both Taiwanese and Estonian to reimagine songs for both recorded and live remixes. His vibrant set included some songs we’d heard earlier in their original format, such as WOOONTA’s “Red Dragon”, as well as songs by Estonian artists such as Mari Kalkun. While some party animals were still dancing, the show shifted into end-of-evening energy as others reclaimed the floor space to sit or even recline as they enjoyed the beats and bangers introduced by Tubli. This additional rhythmic complexity was an excellent capstone for an evening spent mostly with strings of all sorts, and Tubli’s smile and energy as he dug in was easy to reflect back.

At this point it’s worth giving credit, as did each of the artists, to Juliana Volož of JV Promotion, who curated the evening’s showcase with the support of Wind Music. What a gorgeous, enormous show to put together, with so many musicians that I need more new albums from immediately! The only merch I ended up walking out with was one of CHIH CHIH’s… scarf-towels(?) as I don’t have any means of playing a CD these days, but at least I’ve got them all on streaming for now, until I can get to Taiwan or they can come back and play again.

Tallinn Music Week is an annual event, and the next one runs 9-12 April 2026 – details as they’re made available will be on their website.

Author: Laurie