Is it also the case with this album, in which the digital and analogue element meet on two sides of the vinyl record, made familiar by Lithuanian musicians? On one side of the record, we have the laptop quartet Twentytwentyone. The ensemble was founded in Vilnius in 2005, the members being four Lithuanian musicians: Arturas Bumšteinas, Lina Lapelytė, Antanas Dombrovskij and Vilius Šiaulys. Initially, their performances were sonic interpretations of graphic scores and moving images. The quartet use laptops as primary instruments for creating and performing music, but they also employ a wide range of other electronic and acoustic instruments (such as violin, flute, electric guitar, samplers, synthesisers, amplified objects, midi keyboards, etc). For this record, the artists have used selected pages from Cornelius Cardew’s Treatise (1967) as a visual inspiration for their sound material, which was composed by each artist individually, to be later put together in the studio. The text of Treatise is so ambiguous that, in fact, it is open to any reading, and situates every attempt at interpretation on the verge of cognitive anarchy.

On the other side, four original compositions are presented by the members of Diissc Orchestra, four Lithuanian composers: Martynas Bialobžeskis, Antanas Jasenka, Vytautas V. Jurgutis and Jonas Jurkūnas. The ensemble was founded in 2008; their starting point was compositions involving a variety of disc players, stopwatches, special graphic scores, and low-tech devices. This release will symbolically mark the tenth anniversary of their electronic music quartet. Jonas Jurkūnas’ Venta lebewohl 2017, a remix of Jurgutis’ piece Tinohi, which was introduced in the debut programme D.O, recalls Venta, one of the most memorable projects. In Martynas Bialobžeskis’ MY DO, several programmes from Diissc Orchestra are welded into one structure; and Antanas Jasenka’s exe.rpm represents rhythm and frequencies that were often part of the ensemble’s performances. The compositions encourage the listener to ‘read from vinyl records’, hence to interpret sound material that has already been recorded by someone else on a specific sound carrier. Similar media trigger a similar interpretation, if we can use such expressions at all in the world of technological hybrids. We listen, therefore, not so much to readings of the same musical text, as to its medium, vinyl records, played in a certain way (it doesn’t matter
whether or not it coincides with the producer’s intention), in order to conduct a reinterpretation of their content. Once again, the record becomes an object that is manipulated to receive sound from it, to let the matter it is made of speak, to give a voice to the material, which, seemingly silent, determines what we can hear. While listening to it, let us also try to imagine activities similar to those undertaken by the heroes of the album: reading architecture with the bow, interpreting classical scores by colouring them, or reading Proust’s novel reduced to listening to the rustle of the pages.