ACID RAIN

The sound installation Acid Rain is a cloud-shaped object made up of inflatable elements and long tubes, approximately fifteen metres in length, which fill with air and hang in the space like an architectural intervention. A loudspeaker installed beneath it plays a sound composition created using a Roland TB-303 synthesiser and noise tracks.

The TB-303 attempts to imitate words, as if the machine were beginning to speak and send a message to its listeners. Acid rain was something we feared in the 1980s, alongside holes in the ozone layer, scenarios of nuclear winter, and the Chornobyl cloud that drifted over Lithuania in the spring of 1986, something almost no one spoke about publicly at the time. Today, these words sound almost nostalgic, like the name of an old music genre, and that is precisely how they are used here: as a reference to events from the past that echo our contemporary anxieties about the future.

Sound art in Lithuania is still a relatively young field, most often existing somewhere between experimental music and media art, without ever fully belonging to either. As a result, each work of this kind has to negotiate its place anew — in a gallery, a concert hall, a public space or, as in this case, at the Muzikos ruduo festival, where the cloud will hang for as long as there is enough air inside it, while the twenty-minute sound composition will play on a continuous loop.

The installation opens October 1st, 6PM.