Šarūnas Nakas - Ramblings

During his remarkable career, Lithuanian composer Šarūnas Nakas has been acclaimed as a composer of orchestral, chamber, electronic, acousmatic, film, and theatre music, as well as an essayist, a multimedia artist, an author and presenter of films and radio programmes, an organiser of contemporary music festivals, and a curator of memorable exhibitions. After graduating in composition from the Lithuanian Academy of Music and Theatre, he interned at a composers’ course in Poland, IRCAM, with composers Witold Lutoslawski, Louis Andriessen, and Gérard Grisey. In 2007, he was awarded the Lithuanian National Prize for Culture and Arts.

Šarūnas Nakas' music has been commissioned by festivals and ensembles in Lithuania, Switzerland, the Czech Republic, Sweden, and Canada, and performed by orchestras and ensembles such as Windkraft Tirol, die reihe, KammarensembleN, pianocircus, Icebreaker, Bonk, Agon Orchestra, and others. Compositions have also been performed in Germany, Italy, Poland, the UK, the Netherlands, Belgium, Austria, Croatia, Latvia, Azerbaijan, Indonesia, Iran, Costa Rica, Ukraine, Canada and the USA. Together with the Vilnius New Music Ensemble, which he founded and directed, Šarūnas Nakas has given concerts in 15 European countries and Canada, and has appeared at the Warsaw Autumn Festival, Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival, Musica Strasbourg, Southbank Centre London, Prague Spring, etc.

His wide-ranging interests, which seemingly encompass almost all genres of music, technology, astronomy, history, and events of everyday life, are undoubtedly reflected in his work. His music is radical, uncomfortable, strange, sometimes overly austere or incredibly vigorous, and often performed in unconventional ways. The composer creates multimedia installations and often presents his events as sessions rather than concerts. Many of Šarūnas Naks' works are dedicated to departed friends, colleagues, prominent personalities, or even several of them at the same time, thus not only commemorating their memory, but also, perhaps not coincidentally, preparing the listener for a particular experience.

The cycle of nine vocal, instrumental, and electroacoustic pieces, Ramblings, a large part of which was written as music for the scandal-plagued drama play Literature Lessons by Jonas Vaitkus, was recorded in 1985 in the legendary Vilnius Record Studio, which at that time was very open to experiments. The recordings were made using a multi-channel tape recorder, a borrowed KORG synthesizer, saxophones, a prepared piano, a cello turned into a noisy bass, percussion, and bells. The composer used all the texts and the title for the cycle from the poetry collection Ramblings by Almis Grybauskas. According to the composer, this poetry is minor, cold, and laconic, like his favourite cool jazz style, while the title Ramblings itself raises a lot of questions, is a bit provocative and irritating.

After the premiere of the performance, the composer could have had a very bad ending – after "terrible" reviews and complaints appeared in the press, the Soviet censorship ordered the performance to be banned and the creators punished. Even the head of the composition department at the time suggested that this "cacophony" should be given the lowest grade, condemning Šarūnas Nakas to be expelled from the conservatoire, which would have meant being conscripted into the Soviet army during the Afghan war. Fortunately, professors Julius Juzeliūnas and Bronius Kutavičius saved their student.

It was the time of cassette tape recorders, and music was quickly reproduced, so Ramblings began its own journey, playing as background music on radio and television but never being  published as a complete cycle. Later, only one piece called Merz-machine was singled out from the cycle as an example of Lithuanian experimentalism and released in 1997. It then underwent a kind of renaissance: versions were created for different ensembles, including the Czech avant-garde rock orchestra Agon and the London piano sextet pianocircus. The sextet has performed the work more than 100 times in dozens of countries.

In 2023, Ramblings will be released in full scope as a very limited edition vinyl record, produced at Darkroom Records cutting studio in Vilnius. To make the remastered machine sounds sound better on vinyl, they were processed by sound engineer Arkady Vikhorev during the air raids in Kyiv in 2022, and the design of the release was created by Liudas Parulskis. The texts were written by Šarūnas Nakas himself, but it is important to note that the traditional album annotation is not to be expected here.

Šarūnas Nakas on Ramblings: "Now it seems like a painful journey back. From the daily routines, from the present, to some parallel worlds of feelings. To the past, where you cannot fix anything. Ramblings – a dreamlike wandering through different spaces, each time returning to the same point. In that music, my aesthetic sympathies of the time shine through, coming from art rock, jazz, weird Buddhist music, and maybe some avant-garde stuff. I like the unprimed presentation of the composition, with all its naivety, primitiveness, tightness, unresolvability... More realistic and more interesting to myself."