Instruments of Forgetting and the Singing Bone

On her debut album, Gintė Preisaitė strikes a balance between a meticulously experimental and an endearingly pop-adjacent approach.

At first, there is only a tangle of elongated, shimmering strings, nestled in a bed of fuzzy ambience. The mood is droney, but the persuasion of the sustained hum is soft and weightless. It feels like waking up early on a spring morning – so comfy that you’d like to stay in bed for a bit longer, motionless, just a little bit longer. However, Gintė Preisaitė has a different idea for “Vigilance”, the opening track of her debut album. Soon, a surge of horns saturates the stereo field, disturbing the hazy bliss. And by the time we first hear Preisaitė singing in the second half of the song, she has further transformed the instrumental backdrop into a texture, peppering it with field recordings of chirping birds. She delivers a faintly poppy singsong as smooth as the rest of the soundscape, only for her voice to glitch and striate under the influence of electronic effects, before fading altogether.

The fact that the Lithuanian composer, sound artist, and pianist is a recent graduate of Copenhagen’s Rhythmic Music Conservatory will undoubtedly invite comparisons to the characteristic sound of both the city and the institution: music suspended between gossamer ambient, spectral cloud pop, and post-classical figures (think Astrid Sonne, Smerz, or ML Buch). Regardless, Preisaitė’s previous work makes a less expected yet stronger connection to the world of free improvisation. In her collaboration with Japanese no-input mixing board musician Toshimaru Nakamura on 2025’s Live at Ftarri, and in Treen, a trio with saxophonist Amalie Dahl and drummer Jan Philipp, her sensibilities lean toward a fascinatingly breathless hush, extracting sublimely delicate figures from objects and prepared piano. That same personality and fragile yet beguiling architecture suffuse the eight cuts found on Instruments of Forgetting and the Singing Bone.

On “Summary Saint Mary”, the springy noise of prepared piano keys and bowed strings rattles against a hissing background, shaping a haunting atmosphere. Meanwhile, the transition to the muted folk-rock melodies of “Deepen” and the trip-hopish, electronica beats of “Aéroport” might initially sound as if you had mistakenly skipped to a completely different album. However, as dissonance builds up behind strummed guitar riffs and electroacoustic percussion, the pieces suddenly start to fit together. Eclectic as they may be, a distinct, shared DNA runs through every song.

The following two tracks retreat from the previous rhythmic zenith into abstraction. “I Constantly” is driven by short, jittery loops, trilling and shuffling and ringing, while Preisaitė unfurls a spinning web of Björk-esque vocal lines. “Nippon Dreams” ventures even further into experimentalism, highlighting found sounds collected during the artist’s trip to Japan. The piano’s stabs become a soft accompaniment, a source of incidental music, for the scenes unfolding in the foreground.

The penultimate track, “Day”, pushes the avant-pop-tinged balladry that evokes Actress’s brand of ghostly productions into the mesmerizing shapes of “Loop the Pause”, coalescing into something like a blueprint for the whole album. Endearingly pop-adjacent, the song couldn’t be further away from pop’s conventions. Meticulously experimental and engulfed in stunning sound design – tapes click and rewind, the piano articulates a melancholy arpeggio – it layers charming pastoral harmonies that wouldn’t feel out of place on a Fleet Foxes record. In Gintė Preisaitė’s world, these disparate styles are neither counterpoints nor idiosyncrasies; they are merely different branches of the same intangible current. To listen is to be unmoored from the need to tell them apart.