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An introduction to the 2nd CD "GOD-THING / LIVE" by the Concrete Bunnies Today we have more music production than we have time that God has given for listening. When we got the opportunity for a split-second recording of sound and image, we lost control of what we are doing. The uncontrollable stream of creative work that I prefer to call diarrhea / free music grew so strong and powerful that even a million years after the end of the world the angels will enjoy it while sitting at the stars. That is why I personally avoid to go deeper into that stream as long as I am alive. That was the reason why my first encounter with somebody called Betoniniai triušiai (the Concrete bunnies) left a big question mark in my mind. But their stream, surprisingly, appeared to have much more music and ideas than the hundreds of other mini-, midi- and maxi-sized bands with a lot of ambition and little talent in the non-stop movements of d-fm. The first thing that fascinated me was their lithuanian flavour – a kind of slow, sensitive and mysterious audio-poetics: accompanied by the echoes of electro-acoustic music from the 1950s and 1960s, it finds an unexpected, extraordinary and touching way of speaking to the lobulus auriculata of the 21st century consumers – those deaf people with no aesthetic feeling – a straight way to their pinna that makes humans capable of listening. A live-recorded CD is usually of higher quality than others due to its true nervous strain, born from the magic dialogue between the audience and the speaker. This album has a lot of this kind of strain, which is brilliant: full of pain and passion, silence and scream, pressure and explosion, the height of hills (001), the expectance of a flood (002), the vision of waters (003), the extinction (004), the making of something that does not exist (006), the talk / walk of the objects (008), the pinocchio rituals that resemble witchcraft in the burning bushes (100). The Concrete bunnies have their own specific music language: vivid, clear and meditative. Tomas S. Butkus writes a kind of poetry that is naked, postmodern (even though I hate this –ism for being an all-justifying collateral of modernism), and links with the lithuanian modernistic tradition in poetry. Perhaps these links are for better. Perhaps it is something that makes his poetry forceful, fed with the best that we have in lithuanian poetry. Perhaps that is why the bunnies are not afraid of speaking their own lithuanian. The tribe of the bunnies who have voluntarily agreed to put themselves behind concrete walls – in order to escape the aggression of philistine primitive pop art – presents Itself for the trial of the audience, who sometimes lacks understanding, and expects their mercy in a hope for a change in the trial process: there is always a hope to be justified. Music criticism is absent in Lithuania at the moment – even though it can and should be there – but it would use this album to find a lot of ideas for its cold fury, the swing and other frames of mind. Perhaps we will even hear something from the literature critics who are living inside themselves and admiring themselves in their arcades of refined rhetorics. Perhaps even the archaeologists can say their word, if they find some deeply covered cultural layers in this kind of music. These days, when the bulk of lithuanians are more interested in basketball than music, the Concrete bunnies have entered our dull TV-cultural desert with their simple and meaningful quality – probably even without knowing it. Let us make a wish for them to eat all this grass growing in our ears – the old grass that has already turned into hay, blocking our minds from hearing. Giedrius Kuprevi�ius, lithuanian composer |