Through Acoustic Aperture: Jauna Muzika’s Amateur Spirit
Published July, 2025
by Hayden Potter
There’s a certain looseness to the way sound moves through Vilnius during Jauna Muzika, which happened in April this year. It’s not just the acoustics—though they certainly matter—but the feeling of being let in on something that doesn’t need to be polished to be affecting. Now in its third decade, this year’s edition was curated by Sholto Dobie and themed around the amateur, not as a lack of skill, but as one who loves. Tuned into the quieter frequencies of collaboration, intuition, and risk, the festival unfolded across galleries, artist-run spaces, and informal venues. It felt less like a linear program and more like a shared drift amongst moments that didn’t need to resolve to resonate.
For a long-time now, Sholto has played a part in Vilnius’s DIY-spirited scene, known for its hands-on instrument building and artists from non-musician backgrounds. For him, curating the festival meant stepping beyond his usual pace, organising small gigs monthly, into the immersive, layered tempo of a full festival. “I was quite tired after the first day,” he told me, “but then I noticed there’s this sort of threshold, where you start to feel replenished again.”
Vilnius unfolded gradually, often on foot, as I breathed in the chill that followed a brief spring warmth. Amid new faces, venues, and a packed program, Sholto ensured newcomers could orient themselves, setting a thoughtful, steady rhythm. “It’s important for these festivals to also feel restful,” he said, describing the ebb and flow between afternoon concerts, sauna breaks, warm meals and venues sunlit and welcoming. “The festival has its own timeline—you check in and out of it, which maybe keeps things a bit more grounded.”
Originally from Scotland, Sholto brings together outsider curiosity and local instinct. Augustė Vickantė, who’s lived in Vilnius most of her life, remarked: “Sholto really explores spaces—he showed us parts of the city we never really knew.” That curiosity extended beyond geography. Take Noyus, another artist in the festival, for example: he and Sholto didn’t meet in Vilnius, where they both live, but through a mutual friend all the way in Hong Kong. It’s this mix of serendipity and connection that gave the festival its dimension, feeling internationally open, yet deeply local in its affections.
The first concert began at the National Gallery of Art, where, from outside, Li Song and Alanas Gurinas pressed the speaker-ends of their phones against the gallery’s towering glass façade. Standing still and almost unnoticeable as performers, they let high frequencies slip faintly through the glass, only just rising above the rustling crowd.
Before meeting in Vilnius, the two had rehearsed online, testing a method to animate portable speakers using high frequencies as resonant motors. The idea worked, but silently as if the mics had been left off. It showed how such delicate sounds are often lost to tech’s smoothing filters, and underscored the improvisational nature of their collaboration.
Inside the gallery, long silences stretched as the pair slowly entered, seemingly unhurried to fill space with sound. They tapped and tampered, setting phones upright on fan blades to allow the high tones to spin. A delicate, whirring acoustic effect emerged, gaining a coarse edge when they added foil, like a tiny protest against the gallery’s polished neutrality.
Minimalism is key to their work. Alanas is guided by “observation and being in the space,” where even the gallery’s vastness gives way to its tiniest details. Giggling, he notes how “even the smoothest floor is uneven,” as indistinct dust and gradients send the phones wobbling along curious paths. While for Li, he looks for a “system that can take on a life on its own,” setting up the space to focus closer on simply how the sounds interact.
Two nights of the festival were held at SODAS 2123, a self-governed, community-run cultural centre which featured a standout performance by Vanessa Rossetto, who built her set from crowdsourced recordings of people singing songs they love. The invitation extended into the room, with two open mics for anyone to join the swarming soundscape. As her layered field recordings unfolded, I barely recognised my own voice in the murmuring swell. In London, I’d recorded myself singing Roy Orbison’s Crying—boldly, shyly, drifting between earshots in the city’s crowded streets.
That sense of bittersweet exposure connected me with Noyus, another performer at SODAS and longtime experimental pop instigator in Vilnius. For him, playing with musical identity feels easier here, where “there’s a lot less to lose in trying things out.” Shedding what he calls a “snobbish era,” he now embraces the blunt sincerity of pop, performing with a sad-clown flair. “I’ve had maybe three people watch me for the past seven years,” he says. “It’s sad, sure—but also very funny. And I make good music, right?”
Having gone through a breakup while living in London, Noyus found comfort in anonymity, wandering church interiors, drinking cola, and nursing heartbreak. In Vilnius, that openness is harder to sustain and emotions retreat to private corners. His festival set reflected that tension, creating a hybrid space: lyrically extroverted, physically restrained and coaxing sentiment from out of the shadows.
After an off-program night weaving through a queer party in an underground train station, I got sick. Thankfully, the next day’s program took place in a modest, storied building tucked into a leafy corner of the suburbs that felt less a formal venue than a homely space for recuperation.
For Gailė Griciūtė, returning to the Composers’ House, where she once worked and rehearsed, felt like a homecoming. It was a moment of acceptance and shared presence, playing for friends who are also artists she deeply admires. The piano, too, carried its own patina of memory, once housed in the former Lithuanian Composers Union, now finding new meaning in a performance that explored ideas of sonic heritage and change.
Though rooted in academic research, Gailė’s performance grew from something intuitive: “At some point, I started to hear the overtones in my own voice.” For her, being an amateur is less about knowledge and more about discovering shifts in sensitivity. Self-inquiry which led her to ask: What do we actually hear and why? And, perhaps more importantly, how do we listen?
Hybrid live and pre-recorded vocal phrases offered reflections on these questions. While at times instructive, they felt more like incantatory prompts, woven into a tuning that invited deeper listening. Drawing on both Western harmony and Indian Classical raga, rich in vocal overtones, she nudged the audience to consider the tuning of their own ears.
As sunlight streamed through the Composers’ House’s angular timber-framed windows, it seemed to shape the piano’s sound. Despite the lingering sickness, I was moved by the harmonies. But as Gailė sang—stretching syllables, dwelling on their tone—ambivalence crept in. Her lyrics tangled with feeling: “It’s hard to see the elephant in the room, when the ivory keys are so pretty.” A gentle but pointed gesture to the fraught history embedded in the piano’s polished surface.
The final performance of the festival returned to the Composers’ House, featuring Portuguese voice and body artist NU NO alongside Augustė Vickantė. Augustė works with answering machine tapes found online, marked by their unfiltered intimacy. She cuts, collages, and fragments them, turning discarded messages into layered compositions, alive as if answering one another’s messages.
This process of reassembly was also important to their instinctual exchange. “When you play with people who are mainly soloists,” Augustė says, “you have to reduce your information and stop filling space with your usual material.” She embraced restraint, gently EQing to open up lo-fi loops, offering tired ears a way back in. Her focus seemed less on structure, more on texture like the scratch or the weight of sounds. It’s a sensitivity likely shaped by her long connection to Vilnius’s experimental scene, which she’s been part of since childhood.
Raised by parents active in the scene, Augustė remembers Vilnius as a place full of attentive listeners. Still, she laughs recalling herself as the “annoying noisy child,” climbing onstage and interrupting with outbursts like her own curious punctuation. Children at shows remain a contested topic, but to her, their unpredictable energy brings an honesty to performance that adults often miss.
That love of mess and play filtered into her set: tape samples sped up unnaturally, stretched to awkward lengths, or cut through with cartoonish bursts—sometimes jarringly loud, as if accidental. But as she moved between the mechanics of her instrument, a push and pull emerged between artist and machine, revealing something compelling in the unpredictability.
Augustė considers who’s missing from the scene.“It’s been a long time since I’ve seen anyone a bit older in the audience or performing,” she says. For her, bringing them in feels essential to broadening the scene. “There is this sense we’re circling around a similar age bracket,” she explains. “And when things become too familiar, it’s better to let that push you to explore further—knowing there must be someone else out there!” Her closing gestures echoed this same longing to stretch beyond what is known.
As her set, and the festival, wound down to its final moments, Auguste left her workstation but stayed tethered to it. Pulling tape and sitting with her gaze drifting past us, she looked to be fixed on something distant and I began to feel a strange sense of resignation. As the tape was dragged out, it felt like a resistance to the ending. But her gaze, once focused, seemed to drift, less toward an imagined future than into the tactile now, searching for details in the material so familiar to touch yet forever elusive to the ear.
What lingered after Jauna Muzika wasn’t just the music, but the way people gathered to listen, shaped as much by affection as by understanding. For Sholto, there’s a slight trepidation around expansion, but also hope: that the festival can remain intimate while deepening its ties, welcoming new voices, and staying connected to sister scenes and artists abroad. Which was a reminder that Jauna Muzika was about making space for things to begin, less like a showcase than a site of possibility. And a space where things don’t arrive fully formed, but begin in shared time, like a tuning note held open, waiting to resonate.
Text by Hayden Potter
Photos by Ilmė Vyšniauskaitė & Alanas Gurinas
This article is brought to you as part of the EM GUIDE project – an initiative dedicated to empowering independent music magazines and strengthen the underground music scene in Europe. Read more about the project at emgui.de.
Funded by the European Union. Views and opinions expressed are however those of the author(s) only and do not necessarily reflect those of the European Union or the European Education and Culture Executive Agency (EACEA). Neither the European Union nor EACEA can be held responsible for them.