In 2010, three talented young musicians who were still students at the Lithuanian Academy of Music and Theatre, the saxophonist Simonas Šipavičius, the guitarist Paulius Vaškas and the drummer Adas Gecevičius, began joint sound experimentation, in a search for their own musical path. A year later, their quest was acknowledged when they won the Grand Prix in the young jazz artists’ competition Vilnius Jazz Young Power. The band, which has been moving in a clearly worked-out experimentational direction, has already found its niche in the panorama of Lithuanian music.

The trio took a name that combines parts of their surnames, resulting in the enigmatic Sheep Got Waxed, which does not seemingly have anything to do with jazz, or music in general, or at least not in the canonical sense. However, this authentic trio has nothing to do with canons. In their provocative and intriguing work, which rejects all set standards, they study various contexts, covering jazz, rock, punk rock, electronic music and contemporary academic music, creating a very attractive mould. This musical cocktail, rich in unique, energetic and intriguing outbursts of sound, is favoured by alternative music gourmets at large-scale festivals in Lithuania and abroad, as well as in the musical underground. The musicians, who are intensely aware of each other and seem to have grown together into a single organism, claim that by listening carefully to their music you can hear the bleating of a sheep being waxed.

The creative vision of Sheep Got Waxed has been documented in two albums, Sheep Got Waxed (2014) and Pushy (2016). The ‘bleating of the sheep being waxed’ has lately been heard abroad with increasing loudness, in Latvia, Estonia, Russia, Spain, France, Great Britain and Denmark, and in 2017 at jazz festivals in China.

www.sheepgotwaxed.com; www.facebook.com/SheepGotWaxed

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Sheep Got Waxed music is available: www.pakartot.lt/project/sheep-got-waxed