Misha Panfilov: the Estonian musician orchestrating a garage rock renaissance
Musical trends and genre conventions exist largely on a wheel, with each music scene and era that falls out of favour inevitably coming back around again. Admittedly, some of the more enduring music scenes have never particularly disappeared, only adapted to the changing tides of the cultural landscape. One such genre which has been not-so-quietly bubbling away in the background has been garage rock. Establishing itself during the 1960s, audiences have always kept a place in their hearts for the abrasive DIY sound.
Originally, garage rock formed from the harsher end of rock ‘n’ roll, characterised largely by a DIY ethos and distinctly harsher tones than what mainstream audiences might have been used to. Early garage groups like The Kingsmen, The Trashmen and The Rivieras were incredibly important in the development of punk and alternative rock, blazing a trail that thousands of future artists would follow. In many ways, those later styles have somewhat eclipsed the popularity of garage rock, but as a musical manifesto, it has never completely subsided.
Indeed, as new musical styles came to the forefront, the garage scene grew and adapted to incorporate those varying different sounds. Today, the garage rock scene is probably in its most exciting period since its 1960s heyday, thanks largely to the wide variety of groups developing the sounds of garage all around the world. In fact, one of the modern era’s most compelling garage rock groups hails from the unlikely setting of Tallinn, Estonia.
Tallinn is the hometown of multi-instrumentalist, producer and artistic visionary Misha Panfilov, who has been working prolifically on a range of projects which aim to explore the worlds of jazz, krautrock, bossa nova and everything in between. Perhaps the songwriter’s greatest efforts, however, come in the form of Penza Penza, a captivatingly experimental psychedelic garage group proving once and for all that the garage rock ethos will never truly die.
Since the outfit’s inception in 2016, Penza Penza have released four groundbreaking studio albums, each more captivating than the last. In essence, Panfilov’s group pays tribute to the original wave of garage rock revolutionaries, but he also manages to imbue the records with a variety of more modern influences and his own unique take on the garage genre. Given that, in many of his other projects, Panfilov focuses on experimental jazz, it is not all that surprising for those influences to bleed over into the world of Penza Penza, but it creates a listening experience unparalleled by virtually any other modern garage rock group.
Particularly on the band’s latest release, the Funk Night Records-backed Alto E Primitivo (‘Loud and Primitive’), songs like ‘Midnighter’ best exemplify this unique blend of spaced-out jazz, experimental psychedelia and DIY garage rock. Despite being distinctly more high-brow than the fuzzy tones of original garage groups, Penza Penza also manages to convey a distinct feeling of unpretentiousness; there is a certain sense of organic, improvisational joy within the grooves of their records.
The musical field is far more oversaturated now than it was back during the garage rock golden age of the 1960s, but Tallinn’s Misha Panfilov still stands out among all the rest. A fearless innovator and visionary, the Estonia-born, Portugal-based producer and multi-instrumentalist has created some of the most diverse, interesting and rocking records of this current decade, and it is about time that mainstream audiences started to take notice.