Contemporary music is a living language of the present – one that not only creates aesthetic experiences but also raises questions about humanity and our relationship with an ever-changing world.

At the festival, we explore the music of contemporary Lithuanian composers through an anthropological lens: as a reflection of social and cultural relations and an expression of the diverse states, experiences, and ways of thinking that shape contemporary life. Music becomes a kind of seismograph of the present, registering bodily responses, the impact of technology, connections within communities, and wider social change.

This year’s festival theme is “Sonic Anthropology”, with intersections at the heart of its programme: points of contact where different materials, ideas, experiences, and ways of perceiving reality meet. At these intersections, they may merge, but they may also generate friction and tension, open up a rupture, or give rise to a new hybrid form. Rather than a fixed boundary between opposites, an intersection is a living field in which one state acts upon and transforms another.

Across the festival programme, human and technology, body and instrument, voice and vibrating string, individual experience and collective creation, composed structure and spontaneous improvisation encounter and transform one another. Music interacts with biology, documentary film, shadow theatre, performance and visual art, while sound itself may be inherited, distorted, reworked, wounded, fragmented, and reassembled.