KNUS (Music for Headphones)

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

The music JŪRA ELENA ŠEDYTĖ (b.1995) composed at the beginning of her creative career can more or less fit into the category of art music. But at the moment she is more focused on interdisciplinary art projects, in which she often appears as a performer of her own works, using her voice, electronics and the elements of other artistic disciplines. Such works can hardly be documented to convey the real effect experienced during the performance because the live participation of the viewer/listener in the act of the performance is one of their most integral features. I am, however, certain that Šedytė’s KNUS (Music for Headphones) will affect the audience as a kind of ‘tone painting,’ which can be experienced ‘here and now’ time and again.

KNUS (2020) is a collaborative work by two composer-improvisers, Jūra Elena Šedytė (voice) and Simonas Nekrošius (DIY instruments), which represents the process of instant composing. “It reflects,” Šedytė says, “performers’ creative thinking, mood and capabilities that manifested themselves at the very moment this music was performed and recorded (on January 24, 2020). Perhaps the piece won’t evoke many pleasant feelings, as we had no such hedonistic intentions. The sequence of sounds and events provoked everybody involved in the process, listeners and performers alike. In the course of musical development there are plenty of unexpected events, to which performers react and thereby communicate between themselves. The verbal text that surfaces every now and then, just like the expressive devices employed in the piece, arose as a result of spontaneous, intuitive creative impulses and presumably also ideas, events, structures and snippets of sound deposited in our memories. The word ‘knus’ which is used in the title and is heard in the course of the work means ‘to embrace’ in Danish. It might also refer to the way the binaural sound recording technique embraces the listener’s ears – it is recommended to listen to this piece with headphones – and simulates that particular space, in which the work was created and executed. Meanwhile, the binaural effects, designed to give weight to the musical characters being created, enhance the listener’s imagination and perception.”

Vítězslav Mikeš