Review: Gintė Preisaitė • Instruments of Forgetting and the Singing Bone

A Lithuanian in Copenhagen carves a bone and lets it sing: liturgical drone, gamelan-piano and musique concrète held together by a secret discipline — the debut album of Gintė Preisaitė on FELT.

Gintė Preisaitė — Lithuanian, trained at Copenhagen's Rhythmic Music Conservatory, first surfacing under the veil of Baraboro and then alongside Toshimaru Nakamura — titles the album with two contrary gestures held in the same hand: the instruments of forgetting and the singing bone. To forget and to remember, to erase and to inscribe. The bone, in the old northern European ballad, is the murdered one's — carved into a flute, it confesses the crime of its own accord: dead matter speaking again, timbre as testimony. The whole record lives in this torsion — the human voice that never quite leaves, resurfacing out of the collage like a guilt.

FELT, the label, presses on with its dig through the murky waters of contemporary Scandinavian electroacoustics, and here brings us someone who belongs to those waters only by adoption: Preisaitė's sound resembles neither Astrid Sonne's nor ML Buch's, the shared conservatory notwithstanding. It is an idiom of its own, made of pop that doesn't want to be pop — an album aware of pop, refusing none of its charms but corralling them into the misshapen form of the avant-garde.

"Vigilance" opens with five minutes of liturgical drone, an organ-breath that isn't an organ but a congregation of moaning acoustic instruments — viola, double bass, the quinton campanula, Malthe Kaptain's trumpet, Oskar Tomala's clarinet — an ensemble breathing like a single wounded animal. Then, out of the oblivion, the voice. And it's choral before it even multiplies: overdubs, delay, vocal glitches taking turns until a threshold of aesthetic perfection where voice and technology no longer separate, one luminescent substance.

"Summary Saint Mary" is the most reckless wager. The prepared piano sounds like a gamelan dredged from a river, struck tonal phrases, and over them settle Björk-ish vocal loops and Oneohtrix-school electronic touches — a collage of tuned percussion, drone, piano and ambient recordings that ought to give way on every side and instead holds, vigilant, never one step too far in any direction. This is where the record shows its secret discipline: the palette is impossible, and she handles it as though it were easy.

Then, in "Deepen", the first flesh-and-blood humans appear — an acoustic guitar (Lola Hammerich) that simply accompanies, a slow, heavy-treading drum, and a song. A real song, and a very beautiful one, arriving after all that suspended matter like the first word spoken by someone long silent. "Aéroport" is almost direct, almost sunlit, a transit; "Nippon Dreams" takes up and widens the old gesture of musique concrète — the real world stolen, cut, remounted on tape — but bent toward a dream, made inner geography more than procedure. And "Day", the shortest, is where the shadows lengthen: avant-garde classical that seems to come from a room where Stockhausen and the Nico of The Marble Index had left the windows open, the still air of certain afternoons that never end.

What remains, once the record is over, is not a sum of tracks but a temperature. An album that speaks of fantasy, absurdity, relationships without ever quite naming them, and that makes of the bone — of inert matter, of the sample, of the instrument — its own vocal organ. One forgets in order to sing; one sings so as not to forget entirely. Here, the two are the same gesture.

Instruments of Forgetting and the Singing Bone is on bandcamp

Artist: Gintė Preisaitė

Album: Instruments of Forgetting and the Singing Bone 2026 (FELT)

Duration: 37'24"

Genre: avant folk, electroacoustic

Tracklist: Vigilance, Summary Saint Mary, Deepen, Aéroport, I Constantly, Nippon Dreams, Day, Loop the Pause

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