Part seven: Mooste to Mehikoorma, a travelogue

A week has gone by in Estonia since my last posting, with my time split between MoKS and the excursions to the vast collections of Soviet ruins which dot the landscape of southeast Estonia. While here at MoKS, there's really not much to describe. There have been a lot of intense sessions with a selection of sounds that are getting very close to being completed bodies of work. Some of these will end up on a CD that Intransitive Records in Boston, and the other for an LP that Seattle's Elevator Bath had asked for earlier this year. That said, if you want to hear some of what I had completed, I had given a sampling of the work to one of the producers for the arts program on Estonian Radio. My stuff is at the end of the broadcast after the Estonian hip hop, which might be worth the price of admission anyway. Listen here!

There aren't any pictures of me sitting in MoKS staring intently at the computer or pacing around the studio, trying to figure out why something isn't working. Those would be boring. Hopefully, the images I have of my excursions around Estonia won't be. Of the numerous jaunts I have taken through the countryside -- mostly on bike but also by car under the navigational hand of John Grzinich -- the two most lucrative were a bike ride between Mooste and Mehikoorma, and an excursion to some fantastic Soviet ruins along the Peispi coastline and inland along the traintracks towards Polva. If these locations don't mean anything to you, don't worry. There won't be a test. Mehikoorma is a small fishing community that has enjoyed some recent vitality thanks to the paved road that connects it to Mooste; and Polva is one of the larger towns in the southeastern part of Estonia.

Needless to say, I could have picked a more picturesque day to bike to Mehikoorma. There was a slight drizzle off and on, and it was entirely overcast, with a headwind that helped me push me toward Lake Peipsi, but was certainly my adversary on the way back to Mooste. Getting to see Lake Peipsi was a personal goal of mine while here in Estonia; and well, I saw it. Not really much to report. Like many large bodies of water, there were seagulls, boats sailing in the distance, and a pretty nifty lighthouse. But on the way back I stopped at a massive complex of Soviet agricultural ruins, whose concrete roof had begun to be populated by a small orchard of trees some 6" - 8" tall.

Travelling around with John has been invaluable, as he's been scouring the landscape for interesting sites, ruins, and architectonic oddities for the past three or four years. One place he took me was to an abandoned pumping station near Lake Peipsi. It seems that both throughout Soviet time and through the current EU funded government, portions of the marshes around Lake Peipsi have been drained to turn the bogs into farmland. The abandoned pumping station seems to be one of the failed Soviet plans, with the current engineering working much better. There were plenty of metal sheds, disconnected power substations, and subterreanean caverns to record. I didn't bring the digital camera with me on this excursion; the pinhole was the visual recorder of choice for that day... so you'll just have to wait! Later on that day, John took a back road toward Polva and we came across a set of telephone wires near some railroad tracks that had this amazing set of wind-activated drones vibrating between all of the poles. Our final stop was a semi-abandoned pair of oil tanks outside of Polva. These things were huge, something like 120 feet tall and maybe 75 feet in diameter. Correspondingly, the reverb of the tanks from within was incredible. Just a tap on the metal produced an echo nearly 10 second long. After this one excursion with John, I nearly filled up a 75 minute MiniDisc... with source material that will prove invaluable for years!