Cinematic

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

Back in 2004, the Russian composer and music producer Artemiy Artemiev sent me a few CDs released on his label Electroshock. These included a portrait album of works by ANTANAS JASENKA (b.1965) titled An Artist and a Plane. I found myself totally enthralled by what I heard on this disc, especially with the track Electronic Sutartinės (2003) – a work for sutartinės singers and computer, composed as a commission from the MaerzMusik festival in Berlin. The sutartinės (performed by the ensemble “Trys keturiose”) become part of very different contexture here, which creates an unusual sounding that contrasts the typically lyrical mood surrounding these Lithuanian folk songs. The composer reveals that the electronics works here like a “welding machine” that helps to piece together the past and the future. It occurred to me that a work like this would make the perfect contrast to Kutavičius’ “acoustic sutartinės”, in the CD album Between Music and Ritual curated by me. For that reason, I commissioned Jasenka to write a new piece that would in a way resemble the composition of 2003. But he did not want to turn back to that kind of noise music. Instead, he came up with Cinematic (2020), a piece of ambient music. Yet it still has that perceptible rhythmic pulse characteristic of the sutartinės and the unhurried, hypnotic movement of voices within the polyphonic texture. “Everything was made using hardware, while the computer was utilized exclusively for editing. My aim was to employ real musical instruments, such as the Moog, Rhodes Piano Mark I and claves. I intentionally avoided using software and tried to find my own authentic mode of performance instead.” In this new piece, he employed his own principles of balance, binarism and three-dimensional space. So, the title may be understood both as a “film without the visuals” and as a loose reference to kinematics.

Vítězslav Mikeš