Estonia 1
“The most active band lately has been Sociasylum that features members of previous hc/punk bands.
Hirnlos, NMR and Lahesõda haven't been very active lately. Hirnlos's vocalist Ilja went off to live in Poland for the time being, NMR's members live in different parts of Estonia right now and the guys in Lahesõda are focusing on their other band Everfade, that's metalcore.
Despite this we have had pretty good gigs during this year. In May Tragedy, then in the summer Bernays Propaganda from Macedonia and just last week Questions from Brazil and United and Strong from Germany played here.
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The other good thing is that we now have our own place for gigs! ylase12 is an infoshop/social centre that holds events starting from chess nights to punk shows (: We have had some pretty good gigs there already and 2 punk movie nights. Furthermore, this place will also have different books, zines and dvd's about straight edge, hardcore etc.
Quite a lot of the information in the last entry about Estonia is outdated. I'm not sure if Follow Your Dreams studio even exists anymore, and if it does then there are no shows anymore!
Hardcore punk is not popular at all in Estonia. For example, in my hometown, Tartu, which has about 100 000 inhabitants, I know only of a couple of other people that are into the same music. It's a bit better in the capital, Tallinn, but still, you can't compare the popularity of hc punk with metalcore or punk rock.
And out of those few people that are into hc, not all are in bands. A lot of them have jobs, school and other duties like activism. Some even all of them.
As for the zines, blogs and labels, I guess when there's no strong scene or bands you don't get these kind of things. There used to be one zine from Tallinn, but it was published only in russian and had about 3 very thin issues. The only hardcore website and forum we had, closed down a few months ago because of the rare use.
Still, I wouldn't say that everything is dead right now. We still have gigs and at least one good and active band. People have different ideas about zines and blogs and hopefully something new will pop up in the near future.
One good thing about our scene is that nothing here is taken for granted. People are very respectful and helpful when they see others doing something, be it bands, zines, punk movie nights etc. It's not rare for kids to stick around after the gig and say thanks to the people who organized it and to thank the bands for visiting us."
