Four Essays is a collaborative online publication initiated by Andrius Arutiunian. With contributions by Raimundas Malašauskas, Marianna Maruyama, and Isabelle Sully, it documents four contemporary scenarios drawn together by their attention to sound, fluidity, surveillance, and virology. Four Essays is a non-linear publication, with multiple endings and several beginnings, and it was organised as a polyphonous experiment between text, image, and sound.
Each of the essays has a dedicated sonic counterpart composed by Andrius Arutiunian. These tracks share one sound source — an 8 hour-long field recording of a small beach gathering that ran late into the night on the 21st of May 2020, somewhere on the coast of south-east France. Just as the weather began to warm and the first lockdown of the pandemic slowly eased, the participants of this party danced, drank, played, and told various stories all throughout the night. This nightly field recording became a musical refrain of the Four Essays – it echoes and reappears throughout the different parts of the music. The electronic sounds were slowly merging with the field recordings, diffusing and obscuring it, as a musical interplay between each of the essays.
With contributions by: Andrius Arutiunian, Raimundas Malašauskas, Marianna Maruyama, Isabelle Sully
Designed by: Gailė Pranckūnaitė
Music by: Andrius Arutiunian
Produced and recorded in The Hague, Rome & Vilnius, 2020
Made with financial support by Stroom The Hague