Ugnė Makselytė
Jul 25, 2024


Ugnė Makselytė

I do create experimental electroacoustic music by blending field recordings, vocal polyphony, DIY samples, and synths. My compositions range from electronic dance music to soundscape composition incorporating elements from folk, baroque music, rave, ambient, meditation, noise, musique concrette etc.

I’m also interested in exploring the subconscious through meditation, deep listening, environmental exploration, improvisation, trance and dreams. I turn my work to such explorations and seek to draw other people’s attention to their own interiority and to encourage them both to introspect and to expand their own sensitivity and deeper awareness of our environment. 

I believe that natural and industrial soundscapes can be used as a medium for us to connect with each other and experience our (sub)consciousness deeper. I practice field recording sound art by using sound collage to musicalize the environmental noises. This approach helps me to question the traditional distinction between musical and non-musical sound. It is not only important for my work in sound art, but also in everyday life, as it allows me to explore the world as a holistic whole. I seek aesthetics, beauty, and meaning in both the singular and the ordinary routine of everyday life. The principle of equality and anti-hierarchy is a core value for me, both in music and in the social sphere. Therefore, the themes that interest me as an artist and as a human being naturally follow: ecology, naturalism, psychotherapy, human rights, environmentalism, ritual, improvisation, and experimentation.

Practice: Sound artist, composer, performer, teacher

Areas of interest: Field recordings, ecology, deep listening, voice explorations, experimentation, improvisation

Magic Carpets project

Kauno Pasakos

The project places newly created tales about Kaunas and its inhabitants in the very centre of the city. The tales have been created and depicted by nine Kaunas artists and creators, based on Julius Kaupas’s book Doctor Kripštukas in Hell. This book is a collection of fairy tales that intertwines philosophical thoughts, humour, fairy tale motifs, wisdom and eternal values, and brings to life the secrets and beauty of Kaunas.

Co-authors of the idea.

Jokūbas Bateika, Tadas Zaranka, Karolis Skiparis, Loreta Valantiejienė, Jolanta Vilija Galdikaitė, Ieva Trišauskaitė, Marius Šablevičius, Ugnė Makselytė, Vytautas Mikalauskas.

Illustrator: Agnė Žiūkaitė

Past projects

Womens’ voices. Stories from Kaunas textile industry

The sound installation was created as a collaboration with the artist, researcher, and curator Agnė Bagdžiūnaitė. Installation was a part of audio – visual exhibition under the same name at the Kaunas Picture Gallery in 2023. The exhibition reveals the multi-voiced narratives of women who worked in Kaunas textile factories during the late Soviet era and the first decade of independence. It is a polyphonic narrative: people’s stories, and memoirs surrounded by the soundscape of artist Ugne Makselytė. Although the historical textile factories in Kaunas have disappeared, their interiors, the sounds of their machines, the smells they emitted, the chemistry of the fabric dyes, and the images of the steam have remained in the imagination, dreams, and memories of the women who worked there as a background. In it, the women’s lives, the twists and turns of their careers, and the relationships of the work team are intertwined, intertwined, or interrupted, just as they are today, but in a different way. The stories of eight women who worked at Drobė, Kauno Audiniai, and Litex – ten hours of documentary collected by the exhibition curator Agnė Bagdžiūnaitė – have been transformed into a 55-minute audio composition. It is a kind of fiction, like radio theater, a play about work and feelings towards work, machines, and materials.

 

Ecology

Type: Soundscape composition piece

Ecology is a project born out of the author’s ambition to combine field recordings and noise music with the principles of more conventional music composition (like four-voice harmony and a certain form of the piece). It is a composition of field recordings created in 2023, with the material collected in Lithuania, Greece, Italy, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Macedonia, and Bulgaria. This work was the creative part of the author’s final Bachelor’s project in 2023, at Kaunas University of Technology, graduating from the Music Technology program.

An attempt was made to compose the field recordings as if the whole work was tonal and written in the key of F. In the end of the piece you will also hear an element of vocal improvisation with a church bell as its accompaniment.

Throughout the piece, each stop represents a sonic journey into a unique acoustic environment created by various field recordings that are unrelated to each other. Although the collages that follow the ‘refrain’ may appear chaotic and unexpected at first, they ultimately contribute to the repetitive structure of the composition.

In conclusion, it’s probably unlikely that you can perceive the harmony by ear in this piece. However, creating a general balance between the various sounds that comprise the piece was the goal, and using idea of harmony-based composition helped me achieve that.

 

“The Eyes of Sirius”

Type: Audio Fairytale

Sirius’s Eyes is an audio fairy tale written by Ugnė Makselytė in 2022. The story is inspired by folklore, mythology and rituals of different cultures. The most inspiration comes from the tradition of the initiation ritual in various shamanistic cultures. The creative process is also strongly shaped by the author’s dreams and visions that arose during meditation. The tale is about Sirius, a person who lost his eyes during a dream. After becoming blind, Sirius went to the forest, hoping to regain his lost eyes with the help of the spirits of the forest. Sirius encounters a variety of forest creatures and has to overcome a number of obstacles related to spirit transformations. Eventually Sirius finds his eyes in the burning ears of the Blue Forest Cat. Will he be able to get them back out and regain his sight?

Music was composed by using processed field recordings and DIY samples.

What inspires you as an artist? The ritualistic nature of the everyday life, old forests, existential weirdness, fear of death, birds

What do you think is the purpose of art? Healing

Contacts

Email: [email protected] | ugnemakselyte.com | Listen in here | More in here