Estonian fiddler Maarja Nuut imagines an endless landscape on "Kargus"

The track appears on upcoming album Hold Of A Dream, which "leads listeners into an ambient, looping electronic retelling of the village musical traditions of pre-war Europe."

"Kargus" is a cyclic, minimalist composition with haunting loops of melody buffeted by gale-force strings. Nuut contrasts these disconcerting strings with wispy, folk-inspired vocals stuffed with fresh energy, endlessly spiralling and twirling around the brittle string sounds. It's dramatic and it's cinematic, and it's full of springy rhythmic shifts - with just the subtlest of movements, Nuut evokes visions of desolate glaciers and harrowing tranquillity. It's dangerously beautiful.

Speaking about "Kargus", Nuut says: "This piece carries a crisp, vast and wide landscape. The feeling when looking over the land that is entirely covered with snow and there seems no end. Weirdly, this melody came to me when working on a collaboration project with a Tuareg musician [Alhousseini Anivolla] and therefore also represents an imaginative desert landscape. Imaginative because I’ve never been to a desert but have been dreaming of standing there in the middle of endless sand dunes since childhood. I feel there’s something very similar between those two far-away and somewhat opposite places."

Hold Of A Dream is out on 3 June.

Stream "Kargus" below.