Whispered January

CD Between Music and Ritual. - Music Information Centre Lithuania, MICL CD111, 2021

ARTURAS BUMŠTEINAS (b.1982) is currently among the most active and multidirectional artists on the Lithuanian interdisciplinary and sound art scene. He also often acts as an entrepreneur, initiating various experimental collective sound projects involving both Lithuanian and international production teams. His work owes much to his encounter with Fluxus art. Bumšteinas is a libertarian artist who acknowledges no limitations to artistic expression. This does not turn him into a heretic though; he is rather “a moderate liberal who upholds the conceptual art of John Cage and the simplicity of Robert Ashley and the minimalists whose legacy he comments on in his works with insight and quick wit, while his verbal commentaries testify to his nonpathetic reverence towards them” (Jozef Cseres). Discussing music with him is great fun. We met each other in Brno in 2014, while he was participating in the Exposition of New Music festival. Sometime later, I was delighted to help him out with simultaneous interpretation of dialogues in Czech for the recording of his piece The Year of the Catdog (2016) commissioned by Radio Vltava.

Bumšteinas turned for inspiration to Robert Filliou’s text Whispered Art History (1963). “Next year, I’ll produce a musical or sound performance based on Filliou’s entire text at the Juozas Miltinis Drama Theatre. I’ve been working on this text for quite a while now and it has never bored me,” he responded to my request to send me a “small bit” of his work Whispered January (2019). In the given version, Whispered January appears like a sketch for a larger piece (Bumšteinas, by the way, has already made a choral setting of Filliou’s text in his 20-minute work So Time Goes By commissioned by Deutschlandfunk Kultur). In this piece, he collaborated with the Lithuanian interdisciplinary artist Viktorija Damerell (b.1992) whose whispering of Filliou’s text accompanies the sound collage, which was assembled using objects, materials and situations mentioned in the text.

Vítězslav Mikeš