Maarja Nuut (estonia) at Bray Jazz Festival at Bray Town Hall

Maarja Nuut is an extraordinary musician, a fiddle player and singer from Estonia who uses technology to rework Baltic folk styles to create impressively original songs and soundscapes.

She performs solo, helped by a producer and sound engineer who assists in constructing sound loops of her instrument and voice, matching repeated phrases against melody lines. The results are often startling.

Maarja plays both plucked and bowed fiddle. She has a cool, intimate and often dream-like vocal style. In performance, she seems to be channeling memories. Nuut has admitted that her mission is to explore the emotional spaces that border on the conscious, waking state. ...

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Maarja Nuut is an extraordinary musician, a fiddle player and singer from Estonia who uses technology to rework Baltic folk styles to create impressively original songs and soundscapes.

She performs solo, helped by a producer and sound engineer who assists in constructing sound loops of her instrument and voice, matching repeated phrases against melody lines. The results are often startling.

Maarja plays both plucked and bowed fiddle. She has a cool, intimate and often dream-like vocal style. In performance, she seems to be channeling memories. Nuut has admitted that her mission is to explore the emotional spaces that border on the conscious, waking state.

Her strange, incredibly simple rhythms exert a continual, hypnotic spell on the listener. Sometimes this spell is conjured by patterns on the fiddle, sometimes it takes its cue from her foot stomping or hand clapping, and frequently through looped vocal lines.

“… that's what it sounds like when the snow sings” – Simon LeBon

“ … a striking solo violinist rooted in local folk but taking it closer to the psychedelic. A transfixing performance”- Mojo

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