A label born out of necessity.

El Chico Records is a record label, production house and sound-engineering studio in Vilnius, run by Domantas Pūras and Ignas Šoliūnas, with Jokūbas Preikša as executive member. It started with a gap. Lithuania has no shortage of good musicians, but nobody was pushing this hard in this direction. There was no single home where jazz drummers, modular synthesists and academy-trained composers could share a catalogue. We were already doing the work ourselves: writing, recording, mixing, mastering, booking the halls. The label gave all of it a name. If we’re honest, it is also the thing that keeps the three of us reasonably sane.

The compass came from an unlikely source. In a BBC documentary on krautrock, Iggy Pop remembers the first time he heard NEU!. To describe what those two men from Düsseldorf had stumbled onto, he reaches for a strange, perfect phrase: pastoral psychedelicism. It isn’t our name, and it isn’t quite a genre. It’s closer to a state of being, one we’ve tied ourselves to, and the music we love tends to fit inside it. It has little to do with psychedelic rock. It is a state that feels holy, almost saintly, and at the same moment wildly, unmistakably otherworldly. The village chapel and the far side of the moon, in the same breath.

That state is what we chase. Ritual, for us, is not incense and costumes. It is what happens in a room when a long piece is allowed to run its full course. Breathing falls into step, the clock quietly gives up, and a room full of strangers drifts through the same sound together until nobody is entirely sure where their own body ends. We build for that deliberately, through repetition, structure and patience. Anyone who has lost themselves in great music knows the moment: you stop hearing the sound and start travelling through it.

This is music that rarely announces where it’s going. It repeats, it holds, it seems to stand perfectly still, and then you look up and you’re somewhere else entirely. In the spring of 2026, El Chico Fuendre put that to the test across twenty concerts, from Warsaw and Turin to Binic on the Breton coast.

Some of the work leaves the concert hall altogether: music for a refugee centre, a theatre project with deaf communities, an oratorio built from a deportee’s testimony. What we won’t make is background music. Music to do your taxes to, music engineered to be ignored, is somebody else’s department. If we can’t feel it, we don’t put our name on it.

The roster currently counts four acts.

The roster grows slowly, and mostly by instinct. Every so often a record or an idea arrives that sounds like something the world should hear, from someone who plainly means it, and the family gets a little bigger. Alongside the releases, the studio handles the rest of the craft: recording, mixing, mastering, composition, production, film and theatre scores, concerts, events and artist management. Bring us a sonic question. If we can feel it, we’ll take it on.

Got a sonic question? Send it our way →