PROGRAM 2024

Dominykas Digimas (b. 1993) is a composer of the younger generation, whose practice spans a wide range of sound and music practices. In addition to his work in the field of academic music, Dominykas is active in the contexts of sound art and performing arts.

The music of Dominykas Digimas is ascetic, never congested with too much fabric, concentrated. To an extent his works can be described as introverted; they encourage self-assessment and submerge in a subjective reflection. Characteristic is also a sense of unique, hovering melancholy, which he presents in slightly altered forms in his various works. It manifests itself in different ways: sometimes an accordion imitates the sounds of a traditional Japanese Shō and at times it is prompted by the solitary sound strolls through the city soundscapes. This emotional palette has been a part of the composer’s voice since the beginning and is characteristic of almost all of his works.

Edvardas Šumila, music critic and philosopher

Sound performance for clarinet, live electronics and an underground train station passage

It is a transit site that acts as a link between two connection points. The physical and personal experiences of each individual are transported and transferred as they pass through it. It is the place where everyone passes through before getting off in another city or country. As the crowds increase, the passageway becomes filled with a myriad of different life stories, travel motives and moods. The performance thus becomes a living space, like a part of a hyphenated network, responding sonically to the flow of people as individual units of energy. 

The underground passageway at Vilnius railway station connecting the station building and the platforms is special in a way that it is a fairly narrow corridor that can easily be filled with ambient drones using a 6-channel sound system. A person descends the escalator and after automatic opens, he is flooded with a wave of sound. Person enters a continuous sonic cloud through which he passes as if through a filter and finds himself on a platform and eventually on a train. 

The performance features a live, ambient soundscape that responds to the schedule of arriving and departing trains. Each time a train arrives, a large wave of sound is flooded in with the flow of people. Before departure, as people slowly gather to board the train, the layers of music build up and the sound intensifies until the train departs. All this is performed by two musicians, one playing the clarinet, the other live layering and processing the sound and adapting it to the space. The clarinet is chosen here as an instrument whose timbre is quite transparent, whose tone has a narrow overtone range and resembles a sine tone. This sound is pervasive, widely distributed in space and gives the impression of a sound that is all over the place. 

The site-specific sound performance “IN BETWEEN” was first performed in 2014. Ten years later, the performance still represents the constant need, and sometimes a necessity, of people to move from one place to another – thus forming a network of moving, living organisms, whose position influences the everyday ecosystem of society. We can only imagine what would happen if this network suddenly came to a standstill, or if it became clogged up in the event of a strong need to leave the city, or if it became a safe place where, under very bad conditions, the living energy would be concentrated in one place.

Premiere: 2014