Built during the interwar period as Forum, the city’s most modern cinema, the building became the two-screen Laisvė cinema during the Soviet era. For a time, it was also home to a cult video salon.

After Lithuania restored its independence, a music club called Senasis stalčius opened on the cinema’s basement level. It hosted rock concerts, poetry evenings and various cultural events charged with the spirit of the 1990s.

The Combo music club soon took over the main auditorium of Laisvė, and large dance music parties began to be held here in 1998. They attracted several hundred people, while the decks were taken over by some of the most forward-thinking names on the electronic music scene at the time: Kaunas duo DJ Žvėriukai, One Ear Stereo from Klaipėda and Diskomafia from Vilnius. The parties featured fresh house, techno, breakbeat, drum’n’bass and other styles already popular around the world.

Combo was the place where electronic music in Kaunas began emerging from the underground and moving into halls filled with hundreds of dancers. The club inspired many later electronic music event series and clubs across the city – from the abandoned river pier in western Kaunas to the Kaunas Lagoon Yacht Club in the east.