If you haven’t heard about Estonia’s I Land Sound Festival on the remote Island Saaremaa, you’ve missed out! KALTBLUT was invited to attend the festival and had a chat with the organisers Paap Uspenski and Taavet Bristol.
Throughout the weekend, people were dancing and having the time of their lives at the most breathtaking scenery by the sea. KALTBLUT caught up with the two organisers with the question: What’s it like to set up a festival on an island? What is I Land Sound all about? And how to take care of the environment while hosting such a big party?
KALTBLUT: Who are you, and what is your main focus of I Land Sound?
Taavet: I’m Taavet, and together with Paap, we organise the event. Our task is basically to lead the whole team. Back then, when we started, we were all doing different tasks, but now we are leading a team and giving our team everything they need. We are still kind of doing our own thing during wintertime without the team. We mainly plan the event around that time. Me and Paap also play music and choose the artists ourselves one by one.
KALTBLUT: Based on which criteria do you select the artists?
Taavet: We have five stages and each of them has their own style. So, we pick the acts towards these directions and themes. I myself enjoy the tech minimal and Romanian minimal, which I know really well and love.
Paap has other strong areas. Also, there are managers of the five stages who are strong in their own field of music choice. We, as a team, are discussing everything through, like timetable wise and budget wise. Estonia is not a big country, so you’ve got to plan everything through with all the acts. We have to find a middle way of money, possibilities, while tasting and choosing which stages are best for each artist.
KALTBLUT: What makes the festival so special and unique?
Taavet: It’s our creation, our Baby, so to say.
Paap: It has a unique location because it is a hidden gem. When we started it was kind of a “no man’s land”, so during this process, we’ve involved so many of our friends to build a community. You can feel the love and all the helping hands on the island and the festival.
For me, it creates a feeling of being held in a way, people are friendly and nice, and it feels like home. It is difficult to describe it, you need to experience it yourself!
We don’t put boundaries in our art that we create on the island. The people are free to create whatever they want. Although, we have some values that are important in the field of creating art. One of them is sustainability.
Taveet: It has all started with excel sheets. Our main focus was not on making money out of it. We’ve been paying our debts for many years and now we are figuring out the main balance on how to make enough money to survive and doing what we love at the same time. It is a niche, and we still keep on pushing.
Every time we tried to make an event for the whole purpose of money you could tell that the eyes in our team were not shining, we didn’t create a platform for creativity. Paap is a local, so he must make compromises to also make the locals happy.
KALTBLUT: Can you pinpoint what is most important to you sustainability wise?
Taveet: Everything is important. How to produce less, how to use less, the main principles of green thinking. We try to cover everything even though there are challenges also budget wise. We slowly make steps forward on that.
Paap: The most important thing to think of: We organise a festival on an island. We are surrounded by the sea. You need to think of whatever we can easily land in the sea. The idea is to not take anything extra to the festival that you don’t need. This place is home to most of us.
We think of it that way: We are hosting guests and keeping our house clean. We live here 365 days, so it gives a value of its own.
KALTBLUT: What is going on the island when the festival is not taking place?
Paap: The island holds a long history. Back then a man-made road was built to build a harbour. The harbour was important to connect the people to Tallinn.
Historically speaking it was important. Now it has switched to being more important for tourism and fishermen. We also organise corporate events and sports events here. We have a volunteer work community here and they work for the location and the festival. We do the garden work and get ready for the holiday and summer season.
It is just a spot with a magical sunset view. It has great nature and a lot of birds and a sightseeing area. There is also a small town that is attached to the island, so we have shops and a pharmacy and a school nearby, which makes the place unique as well, so you have the infrastructure of a town and a harbour connected.
KALTBLUT: How do you see the festival developing in the next few years?
Taveet: We have one key value: We don’t want to grow in size or numbers. We don’t want to be famous or anything. We want to balance the festival with our personal lives. And most important: We don’t want to empty out at the end of summer.
Organising is not only fun and flowers and having cool after parties. It is mostly computer work in wintertime and hustling in the area. We want our team to last. To me it is sad if another year goes by and the ones who created all that are not being noticed. We want to preserve the festival, so we can pass it on when we get old.
In other countries like Germany, for example, they have more budget and so many more visitors, but there are not a lot of people in Estonia. The money is not the reason, the story behind it is. I was struggling this year because of a huge mental load. I just built a house for my family, and I only wanted to sleep. Now I understand that was not the way to go. We all have to protect ourselves.
We cannot compete with the big names going around in Europe, but our strong side is the team and the place in Estonia, so we are inviting everybody to come!
Paap: It is a festival not done by professionals but by passionates!
You can keep up with @ilandsoundfestival on Instagram to keep up to date with next year’s edition of the unique festival in Estonia.
