The Music Information Centre Lithuania has released the latest issue of the Lithuanian Music Link magazine. This annual publication celebrates a wide variety of Lithuanian music despite live events – the most vital part of its ecosystem – having been affected heavily by the pandemic and the various lockdowns. This theme pervades the 23rd issue of the magazine: the new ‘audience of the lockdown’ appears on the front cover, the quarantine comic strip by Miglė Anušauskaitė is on the back and the article When the Music Stops by Mykolas Katkus is inside.

There are over fifty Lithuanian music personalities, bands and events from alternative, jazz, experimental, electronic, improvisational, classical and avant-garde territories presented in the magazine. Some are researched in detail, others are highlighted with a few accurate strokes. The various tours into these different Lithuanian music scenes and niches have been prepared by their best Lithuanian guides – Dovydas Bluvšteinas, Domininkas Kunčinas, Rasa Murauskaitė, Rūta Stanevičiūtė, Edvardas Šumila, Vitalijus Gailius, Laima Slepkovaitė, Eirimas Velička and Mykolas Katkus.

‘We are always proud of our authors who are experienced professionals in their fields, sharp analysts, sensitive observers, active participants in the scene and excellent writers nonetheless. It is interesting to read their texts and their insightfulness, expertise and appreciation of context leave a strong impression. It is amazing that the magazine continues to inspire the writing of these dense authorial texts at a time when press releases and interviews prevail in Lithuanian discourse,’ comments Asta Pakarklytė, the director of Music Information Centre Lithuania.

According to the co-editor of the magazine, Lina Navickaitė-Martinelli, ‘the fact that we spent 2020 in a parallel, enclosed and suspended reality determined – whether consciously or unconsciously – the theme for this issue of the ‘niche’ and the ‘alternative’. I mean not only the suspension of music events due to the quarantine – which was of course mentioned in a few stories including an interview with the conductor Giedrė Šlekytė and a reflection on the pandemic and the quarantine that deals specifically with this issue – but also a plethora of other articles which interpret niche and alternative phenomena in their own ways’.

The Lithuanian Music Link magazine is an important initiative which aims to increase the international presence and present the diversity, drive and creativity of Lithuanian music to international audiences. One of the functions of the magazine is representation. Therefore, it is also published in sustainable print format using high quality paper, creative design by Tomas Mozūra and featuring professional translations by Romas Kinka and Erika Lastovskytė.

The magazine is distributed free of charge to international music professionals and the online version sees around thirteen thousand unique visitors per year. The publication of this issue is funded by the Lithuanian Council for Culture and Association LATGA. The activities of the Music Information Centre Lithuania are supported by the Ministry of Culture of the Republic of Lithuania.

The English version of the issue is available on the Music Information Centre Lithuania’s website mic.lt. If you are professionally involved with music and wish to receive a free paper copy of the publication by regular mail, please contact us by email at info@mic.lt.

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The latest issue of the Lithuanian Music Link is available online.

All previous issues of the magazine are also available online.

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Translated from the Lithuanian by Erika Lastovskytė
Information from the Music Information Center Lithuania

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