AVaspo

When AVaspo (AudioVisual Asp of Poetry) made its presence felt in Lithuania’s experimental scene, it was clear that it was what had long been missing. Given an unmistakable sense of direction by its lead figure – poet and playwright Gabrielė Labanauskaitė, this fluid collective brings the talents of some of Lithuania’s most noteworthy composers, multi-instrumentalists and video artists of the younger generation together in the melting pot of audiovisual poetry. The poet’s deadpan, alternately meditative and frenzied voice, hovering over an ocean of sounds and noises ranging from ambient to heavily percussive and dissonant, delivers free-form stories of a cold and somber world that nevertheless looks strangely alluring. AVaspo’s emergence coincided with the general upsurge in taste for various contemporary forms of poetry, in many ways propelled by successful multimedia events like the TARP festival, conceived by none other than Labanauskaitė herself.

Jurij Dobriakov