Augustė Vickunaitė

Augustė Vickunaitė is a Lithuanian sound artist and experimental musician with a background in physics, whose practice centres almost exclusively on analogue reel-to-reel tape recorders. Working at the intersection of tape music, noise, and sound collage, she combines field recordings, found materials, voice, instruments, and sounds generated by the machines themselves—including those produced through their gradual deterioration. Her work is driven by an interest in the imperfections of obsolete technologies, embracing chance, instability, and the unpredictable behaviour of analogue systems.

Her compositions and performances often possess a theatrical quality infused with dark humour, occupying a space between concert, installation, and sonic performance. Rather than serving as an archival medium, magnetic tape becomes a living instrument. Vickunaitė approaches tape recorders performatively and by hand, treating glitches, mechanical failures, and the inherent instability of analogue devices as essential compositional material. She manipulates playback speed, tape transport, feedback, and the physical presence of the machines themselves, transforming tape recorders from playback devices into instruments capable of producing their own sonic events, rhythms, and unexpected relationships between sounds.

Her practice is rooted in attentive listening to the materiality of tape and in revealing structures that emerge between composition, improvisation, and performance. In Vickunaitė’s work, analogue technology is not an object of nostalgia but an unstable medium whose failures, limitations, and unpredictability become catalysts for new forms of musical organisation and sonic experience.