Today, Ukrainians marked 1000 days of terror across the whole country, following over a decade of war and multi-generational struggle. Now is no time to give up on listening to Ukrainians – or their music.
This comes after a weekend that was especially tough on the music community inside and outside the country. One of the largest Russian attacks in months landed in Ukraine Saturday, making for a nightmarish night in most of the country, including a deadly attack on Odesa. Since that attack targeted infrastructure, it made for an all-too-familiar scenario: the horror of people being unable to be in touch with loved ones or even wondering if they had been hit.
In a sign of the kinds of times we live in, I found myself this weekend hearing, in parallel, artist friends from Ukraine and Lebanon as they watched as massive airstrikes tore away at bits of childhood and memory. I don’t think there’s anything we can do to heal that, really – but there’s also no reason our friends and colleagues should be left feeling they have to face this alone.
I leave it to Ukrainian voices to speak to the meaning of this 1000-day mark since full-scale invasion (see below for some places to start). But we can certainly listen to some music. And incredibly, the music continues. Artists continue to raise funds for defense. (I remember the adage in the USA about waiting for the day when militaries had to hold bake sales – for Ukrainians, that’s a literal reality and a matter of survival.) Events continue from Kharkiv to Kyiv, even with curfews and air raid sirens and devastation. Sitka Instruments still ships Eurorack modules from Kyiv. It’s all resistance.
Let’s turn the clock back to this show Dmytro Fedorenko and I did back in February at the 10-year/2-year anniversary (coming from a demo, even):
Track listing – all Ukrainian artists:
Томі Гажлінскі -Tomi Hazhlinsky – Акорди -Chords for Tomas
Vlad Suppish – Ghost Train Hocket
Locus of Control – Willpower
Kotyk Murkotyk – wok
didi armor – Efir
OPERITUAL – Ya ne piddamsya
Svet – Gniw (realize this has a video, see below)
ummsbiaus & Difference Machine – коло зачароване
SIREN 3 [seem to have orphaned the info on this, stand by!]
Nalobi Zrobe – spoons research 1
NINA EBA – 13
Sitka – 2AM Long Gone [same as the module maker]
Tetiana Khoroshun- Krymsky Titan
Waveskania – Темна Нічка
Kyiv’s Ujif_notfound has a deep leftfield album that captures the weirdness, the twisted futuristic-catastrophic sense of this time. Against aching-gray backdrops, flurries of glitched-out tune and whistles cry out in tracks like “Lament Of The Peacmaker,” as if distorted by an alien radio trying to tune in whatever the hell is going on in the world. There are plodding, asymmetrical industrial beats beneath clouds of disintegrating pads, and the warped “Lost in Transition,” a surreal pantomime of electronics. This is out on Dmytro’s own label with Zavoloka, I Shall Sing Until My Land Is Free:
For his part, Dmytro has re-released a brooding, murky piece from his VARIÁT project that encapsulates a lot of feelings now:
But I’m also looking forward to this later this week. I’ll save words on it, but I can’t sit any longer on this first track premiere – this is a good place to end, as it embodies resistance and resistance in its insistent, crispy rhythms. If anyone is lost in the deep literal murk that has its grasp on this part of Europe now, this should shake you out of it:
There are ways to not just listen to this music but also listen to the lived experiences of the people behind it. They’re enduring terrors you would wish on no one.
Kyiv Independent continues to do exceptional reporting – and not just the government line, either – all in English. They have a look back today.
Reporter Emmanuelle Chaze is now on BlueSky and has assembled a Women for Ukraine starter kit.
You can also learn more about Crimea from a Crimean Tatar perspective by listening to activist Lia Motrechko.
And in a related story, the music scene in Georgia continues to stand up for their democracy. Tbilisi is still in the streets as I write this, and our friends at Mutant Radio have a discussion planned for the 24th:
I suppose some folks might presume I’m a conflict ambulance chaser, but truly, nothing could be further from the truth. I can’t wait for the day we just write about music again, and the backdrop is… us wasting time. I hope to see y’all back in your home country and one day without the air raid sirens.
These days, we’re often given a false choice between supporting one group and another. It’s sometimes so extreme as to trade one empire and its weapons for another, one set of drones and missiles for ones with a different make. A friend of mine reporting from the front lines in Ukraine sent me a picture of a crowd of photojournalists in Beirut. They’d vacated the Ukrainian battlefield and set up for some good shots of the chaos and devastation in Dahieh instead, evidently. The world’s gaze sometimes seems only able to fix on one object at a time — and not look with any particular depth or empathy at that.
I give endless permission to anyone going through this to focus on their own situation. Those of us privileged enough to come from countries without this kind of war should do more of the heavy lifting and find a way to multitask, and support those folks who are working on solidarity against all odds. I’d recommend listening back on this episode from the devoutly transnational platform The Fire These Times, founded by Elia Ayoub:
Building Ukraine-Palestine Solidarity w/ Yuliia Kishchuk
More recently the podcast has talked to Chkoun? Collective, raising a lot of the same questions – and the “North African” solidarity question is just as relevant to Ukraine, by the way, as just as in Lebanon most recently, migrants found themselves caught up in war. (I even wrote about Morocan-born Brahim Saadoun for RA and his connection to the club scene there, and his escaping a literal death sentence in occupied eastern Ukraine.)
Building Transnational Solidarity w/ Chkoun? Collective
But maybe the most essential reading comes from Timur Dzhafarov, known for his music as John Object. It’s a long essay, but essential – it’s a response from the actual front lines, the literal trenches, to common perspective by my “liberal” and US American counterparts from afar that would discount the reality experienced by Ukrainians:
I’m done believing we’re the stupid ones, Ukrainian soldier tells Jonathan Franzen
Two telling quotes:
As I stand in the sand, staring, enhanced, far into a field in front of me through the lens of a high-end rangefinder, measuring distances and angles to upcoming aims, and the smoke where our last shell hit is clearing, the colonel is repeating the word corrections behind me.
I’d just relayed to him the distance and angle of our last hit, and he and the lieutenant are calculating new firing data taking into account wind speed, temperature, and our previous hit: the corrections. I cannot overstate the importance of the corrections, says the colonel.
…
And I tell him that I was born in a country that saw that history unfold at its front door and had been a long-suffering neighbor in a house that had been robbed many a time. Even in my 27 years, I’ve had a front-row seat, and I hated the view.
However many more days remain, here’s hoping the view changes.