Arturas Bumšteinas

Arturas Bumšteinas (b. 1982, Vilnius) is a composer and sound artist working across a wide field at the intersection of sound, music, and art. He began creating experimental music in the late 1990s and was among the first Lithuanian artists to use the internet as a creative medium. From the very beginning of his artistic career, Bumšteinas has been interested in the concept of “music in the expanded field” and has pursued interdisciplinary, often conceptual approaches to creation.

While still studying at the Composition Department of the Lithuanian Academy of Music and Theatre (2001–2007), he began collaborating with visual artists and touring internationally with his experimental music performances. Collaboration has remained a key strategy in his practice, and over the course of his now quarter-century-long career, he has initiated numerous collectives and ensembles, including G-Lab, Twentytwentyone, Zarasai, Works & Days, and Sneeze Etiquette.

For a period, Bumšteinas’s primary creative context was within the visual arts. His sound works have been presented in around twenty group exhibitions, and he has held eight solo exhibitions in Lithuania and abroad (including Antje Wachs Galerie, the Contemporary Art Centre in Vilnius, and Gallery Vartai, among others). After returning in 2018 from a year-long residency at the DAAD Berliner Künstlerprogramm, he shifted his focus toward the stage. In collaboration with various Lithuanian theatres and performing arts institutions, he created and directed sound performances such as Bad Weather, Urbančičius Method, Big Pharma, and A Perfect New Body, among others. For his work in theatre, he was awarded the Boris Dauguvietis Earring and the Golden Stage Cross.

Another important field in Bumšteinas’s practice is radio art. Since beginning his collaboration with German public radio (Deutschlandradio Kultur) in 2012, he has produced a number of radio works. One of them, Epiloghi, received the Euroradio Palma Ars Acustica award for the best radio art work of the year. This project introduced him to Baroque theatre noise machines, which he continues to work with to this day, developing new versions of his performance Navigations while touring various European festivals. This line of his work can be described as performative sound art, a field in which he is also considered one of the pioneers in Lithuania.

Bumšteinas is not a performer himself; he typically positions himself as a composer who creates instructions for various sonic environments and situations. These works explore themes that interest him and are often based on principles of indeterminacy and constantly shifting form. His instructions take verbal, graphic, and traditional musical notation forms, without privileging any single one of them. A distinctive feature of his musical work is the emphasis on the voice and the interpretative or improvisational freedom granted to performers - many of his electroacoustic compositions are constructed from recordings of improvising musicians.

In 2021, while composing Vexationettes for the Swiss ensemble Phoenix Basel, he explored the possibilities of harmonic material generated by random numbers, continuing his long-standing interest in ready-made and found object aesthetics. He is currently working on a radio art piece that brings together a wide range of his ongoing interests: the art of listening, instrumental and electronic music, theatre, “non-professional” voices, improvisation, and co-authorship.

From the perspective of a quarter-century-long career, the central themes of Bumšteinas’s work can be identified as the fluidity of artistic identity, intertextuality in creation, archives, the shifting boundaries between music and sound art, and the role of the composer as an inventor of new forms of creative collaboration.