Crónica 040 CD
Release: 9 February 2009
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Lovely Banalities is the second release in Crónica from Lithuanian sound-artist Gintas K, after the much acclaimed double CD from 2006 Lengvai / 60 x one minute audio colours of 2kHz sound.
Lovely Banalities presents fourteen short pieces — a collection of miniatures, impressions, sketches, innuendos and errors — inspired on the exceptionality and suprisingness of the quotidian, on the extraordinary everydayness.
Gintas K draws analogies between these pieces and Modest Mussorgsky’s suite Pictures at an Exhibition, mapping fourteen individual moments, ready to be visited by the listener. The pieces of synthesized digital music are contrasted with evocative field recordings, captured in Gintas K’s hometown of Marijampolė, during a windy summer Sunday afternoon. These are sounds of lovely and quotidian moments, unremarkable sounds that are an evocation of forgotten and rediscovered feelings, of small and precious things from the past that still hover in the air, that remain in the streets, somewhere in the grass. The field recordings weave the pieces together, guiding this auditory visit. Lovely Banalities thrives by its apparent formal and structural simplicity, but this simplicity — as in everyday life — is an illusion.