“It’s carnage in there... Some weirdo’s reading poetry and the music’s pounding like crazy...” — I overhear outside the door of BunkerMuz in Ternopil and smile to myself, because I know that isn’t pounding yet: the real pounding won’t start until 9 May. This is just a little aperitif, a prelude, or, as the organisers called it, the Pre_Fest. I don’t know who comes up with their names down there in Ternopil, but whoever it is deserves a pat on the back. Pintset (“Tweezers”), BunkerMuz and now Pre_Fest — short, apt and clear. Over the weekend of 12–13 April things really “rocked”: there was loud rumbling, top-quality squealing, alarming grinding and phonetic versifying, and, most importantly, free experimentation with the widest range of sound sources, performance techniques and musical styles. Intrigued? Want to read on? I can hardly wait to tell you all about it myself, so here goes.
This time BunkerMuz was the festival’s Alpha and Omega: it all began there and it all ended there. Saturday evening was, as is the tradition, given over to the dance floor — I can’t bring myself to call it a club night, and if I called it a dance night, that wouldn’t convey the whole emotional and sonic palette either. First up was Adibass, a cross-disciplinary project by two members of the group ZSUF, Andrii Merenko and Volodymyr Sonichiev. The lads mix all sorts of music, fusing it with live bass guitar and adding their own sounds from a Kaoss Pad synth. After them, Bohdan Suproniuk, aka DJ Bodhy, brought the already warmed-up crowd to the boil. There was hard bass, hard techno, rave and Schranz, all mixed up together, all that drive ground up as if in a mincer, and then, just when it seems that not another drop of drive can be squeezed out of the speakers, Bohdan suddenly pulls a hose out from under the table and, blowing into it rhythmically, pumps up the beat even more, lending the whole mix a kind of industrial depth. As for the mixing itself, DJ Bodhy didn’t bother with it — he simply switched from one track to the next using a basic little app on a tablet...
— Bohdan, tell us a bit about your set. Were those your own tracks? What styles did we hear? It wasn’t pure techno, more like hard techno, right?
— “Well, I don’t even know... I’m not too clued up on genres... but yeah, something like hard techno, probably. I started out with jungle, it’s just they boxed me in a bit — it’s a club, all that jazz; normally I don’t play that kind of thing at all, I’m more into something harsher, like rhythmic noise. Basically it was almost pure DJing, and I messed about with the mic a bit. I don’t usually work as a DJ... DJing is boring — you put the music on and just stand there doing nothing, you have to keep yourself entertained somehow, so I came up with this instrument: I took a drain hose with an adapter nozzle, so your lips don’t hurt when you blow into it. The point is you can stretch it, and the notes coming out change. Actually, I play the didgeridoo — I’ve got a eucalyptus one — and the plastic didgeribone, which slides out like a trombone, so I applied the didgeribone principle to my hose. It’s handy, because you can put a mic at the other end. I often run it through various effects too, to make the sound more interesting, but here, with a wall of sound already going, all you can do is beef up the rhythm.”
It’s worth adding that Bohdan is also a member of the Ternopil band ZSUF, which, incidentally, will be playing on the second day of this year’s Hamselyt (roughly, “It Pounds”) festival. I found a little information about the band online, which I’ll quote here in full, since very interesting phenomena in contemporary Ukrainian music often escape our attention, and that’s a shame.
The band has existed since spring 2001. Back in 1998 a bizarre art collective called Vidirvani vid Opalennia (“Cut Off from the Heating”) emerged in Ternopil, bringing together those who were fed up with grunge, alternative and formulaic rock music in general. The collective (about 10 people) focused on improvised psychedelic music, which framed theatrical surrealist performances. At concerts the action turned into a crazed, uncontrolled happening (everyone played whatever they could, on whatever they could drag onto the stage — from toy glockenspiels to sheet iron and rebar percussion). It was cool, fun and... largely incomprehensible, especially to audiences who were still chewing yesterday’s rock bubblegum and saw ZSUF purely as “stoned aliens” who had been accidentally reincarnated in Ternopil. After a few gigs, Vidirvani vid Opalennia fell apart. From the wreckage, two young men, Oleksandr Rotman and Serhii Vasylyshyn, formed ZSUF: endless home rehearsals and jam sessions, hyperproductive home-taping (about 50 cassette albums in less than a year). There was plenty of free time, since none of them had jobs back then (declassed outsiders scraping by on odd jobs, often not entirely legal ones). On the whole there was an atmosphere of celebration, of total ease and freedom from any frameworks and conventions, and that is precisely what inspired the creativity. That, roughly, is how it all began... ZSUF’s musical experiments and interests range from industrial and noise to psychedelia and all kinds of experimental electronica, with plenty of video art, performances, happenings and installations. Today ZSUF are Serhii “Vasia Punker” Vasylyshyn (vocals, lyrics, samples, concept art), Volodymyr “Sonich” Sonichiev (bass, synths, Kaoss Pad), Bohdan Suproniuk (distortion cimbalom, didgeridoo, jaw harp) and Andrii “Freaky” Merenko (noise, sketches, samples, synths).
At 11 p.m. Mokri Dereva (“Wet Trees”) began to rustle on the dance floor: the project of Yurii Tymoshenko from Kyiv. Yurii admits he once wrote a track with that title and in the end decided to take it as his name. When I asked what it should conjure up, he replied: “Remember climbing trees as a kid in foggy weather.” There may be something prophetic in that, since what Yurii played was no ordinary techno — although, as the set had been prepared for Kyiv clubs, he still had to keep within certain bounds. Yet the brittle rhythms of his Korg drum machines and sequencers kept breaking out of the standard four-square boxes: under Yurii’s fingers they broke apart and warped like streams of water forced to flow around obstacles in their path, splitting and meeting again countless times along the way. The masses of sound spread in much the same way, swaying in the background like treetops, and the broken rhythms behaved like the free-flowing yet far from random rustle of leaves.
Yurii Tymoshenko: “What I played isn’t exactly techno, it’s more IDM — I try to avoid a four-on-the-floor kick. I used to think it was acceptable — untz-untz-untz (imitates the kick drum) — but then I realised that a straight techno beat isn’t very interesting; it’s more interesting when the rhythm is drawn by secondary sounds and keeps developing, when you have to reinforce and accent it every so often. That’s the kind of techno I like; I love experimenting. In last night’s set I skipped a lot of the patterns meant for listening, because there’s a choice: either people stand and listen, or they dance. I wanted people to dance.”
The first day ended with a set by the supply manager of Ternopil’s cultural economy, chief electrifier of BunkerMuz and careers adviser to the Koza Bar art initiatives — Yaroslav Kachmarskyi, or Zavgosp (Soviet-speak for “supply manager”), as he calls himself, not without reason. Yaroslav started organising parties in 2006; the first was timed to mark the landing of Martians on Earth. His musical interests have their roots in the days when he was a goth. Whereas in the noughties audiences flocked to every event because there were hardly any alternatives, today, on the contrary, they go to “trendy” clubs that play either poppy music or out-and-out pop. Yaroslav describes his audience as “conscious people from the art world”, who flock to interesting and experimental music from all over Ukraine. From my own experience I can say that if you come to Ternopil for the weekend, you only need to drop into BunkerMuz to see familiar faces.
— Yaroslav, a few words about today’s event and what’s in store at Hamselyt?
— Since we moved Hamselyt to May because of certain circumstances, and Andrii Antonovskyi, who’s in Ukraine fairly rarely, dropped in to Ternopil from Barcelona, I decided to bring Yura along as well, since he’s already been to Hamselyt twice, and throw a sort of “friendly get-together”. On the first day of Hamselyt there’ll be a party at BunkerMuz with both DJs and live acts, the best known of whom is probably Woo York. The second day is planned for an industrial location in the city, which I won’t reveal just yet. The headliners include Andrii Kyrychenko’s new project, Rayz. On the third day we’ll be going wild again right here, in the BunkerMuz courtyard, until some grumpy bloke comes and throws us out (laughs).
It is in the BunkerMuz courtyard Yaroslav mentioned that Hamselyt’s experimental concerts and jam sessions take place. During the Pre_Fest, Microbing Gristle & Batacat and Subprodukt played here. Subprodukt is Ternopil’s oldest active electronic project, led by Tymur Skorbenko. Other musicians often join Tymur, though, and by playing together they make their Subprodukt.
— Tymur, what did you make of the pre-fest?
— Considering there are only three centres of experimental music, and two of them are cities of a million people, it’s a huge breakthrough that concerts like this happen in Ternopil. The festival gets by on internal resources alone — that is, Ukrainian performers — and in quality it’s on a par with similar festivals in, say, Sweden. Here and in Sweden alike, the same number of people come to concerts like these. The ideal number of performers is when there are more of them than listeners.
— Tell us what you were playing today. What’s that old computer?
— It’s what’s left of a Soviet Elektronika computer, which doesn’t actually work. I stuck an open-source synth in it, a cacophonator like Yaroslav’s, but a bit “tweaked” by these cack hands of mine, so it sounds different. Come to Hamselyt — I plan to finish this project, and it’ll sound in three bands; today you could only hear one side of it... Get behind your soldering irons, there are loads of circuits on the net; honestly, you download one from Google, sit down, solder it and that’s it!
Besides Tymur and Yaroslav Kachmarskyi, Subprodukt at the Pre_Fest also had Andrii Kapusta mixed in, playing his tracks from the project Shkval.
— Were you playing on a games console? That’s a PlayStation, right?
— I’m a gabber, I know what hardcore is, what heavy electronic music is, and I try every way I can to show that this kind of music exists — heavy music that’s relevant today, for throwing off bad energy. A long time ago, when there was no Fruity Loops or any other software, I had a PlayStation and wrote music on it, we’d plink away..., plinkety-plonk (smiles). I wrote that music for four years, and then I moved over to a computer. It was all simple; it all started in 1998. I tried to make hardcore, happy hardcore, and tried writing music on whatever instruments were to hand, and that music, all those tracks, still exist — about 200 of them... We even got through the qualifying round of the Chervona Ruta festival. Loads of music, no lyrics, so we made up the words on the spot, went out and sang, and as usual people didn’t get a thing (smiles), but that’s all rubbish, what matters is the idea. Heavy styles of music need to be opened up for Ukraine, because Europe has had a rave revolution since 1991, while in Ukraine it feels as if it never happened... something has to be done.
— This is your first time at this fest — will you be at Hamselyt?
— I think so... I’ll be bashing away... So it pounds — ’cause it ain’t pounding at all, and it’s gotta pound so hard your brains pop out (laughs).
And to finish, a few words about the Ukrainian-Spanish project Microbing Gristle & Batacat. It is a joint project by the Ukrainian poet Andrii Antonovskyi, who now lives in Barcelona, and Volodymyr Bilyk, a poet, graphic artist and musician from Zhytomyr. Andrii has been running his music project for a second year now. He says he is interested not so much in the narrative as in the phonetic side of poetry: “When I say ‘Baba z Rakhova’ [‘an old woman from Rakhiv’], to me it’s neither an old woman nor from Rakhiv — it’s just that together these words seem to explode.”
He is interested in the sound of words, in phonetics, and even more in phonetic deviations, in mispronunciation. Andrii made this “leap” from visual poetry, which he was into before. Now he uses tape and a tape player to record and play back sound.
— I prepare recordings with a dictaphone, and then a colleague of mine suggested using a processor. Now I use these ready-made recordings and work, essentially, with the voice. With this little processor the pitch of the sounds and of the voice was changed. Volodymyr Bilyk prepared a few tracks as accompaniment. The idea was ambitious; maybe not everything worked out, because Bilyk and I hardly ever see each other. It was more like an improvisation — a bit like the first pancake, which always comes out wrong (laughs). I think it shows me what I need to do next. But it’s cool, because it’s live, and when I perform live I dive into this world of sound and — goodbye.
— Have you presented this in Ukraine before?
— I took part in Hamselyt in 2012, basically with a programme that was technically rather similar. I performed with Bilyk then too, although back then we didn’t process the sound. Sound poetry is very widespread in the West, whereas in Ukraine it’s more a way of filling in the gaps. From the 1930s on we did have figures in avant-garde poetry — Tarnavskyi, for one, Emma Andiievska, or the Kyiv School of Poetry — but those poets were banned, they weren’t promoted. So Ukrainian society has been brought up in such a way that it doesn’t accept this kind of art. It’s a shame, but what can you do... Although today there was a small group of people who were interested. Some even applauded — I hope the applause wasn’t just politeness and people really liked it (laughs).
And we hope to hear Andrii Antonovskyi and Volodymyr Bilyk in Lviv... Such was the prelude to the Hamselyt festival, which, I hope, will start on 9 May in Ternopil and run until 11 May. Besides the official programme, which is easy to find online by searching for “Hamselyt 2014”, the HOMEPLAYING (“Home Jamming”) project, with the support of the NGO NURT, has prepared a concert-performance on the Lviv–Ternopil commuter train on 9 May for everyone travelling to the festival from Lviv. Details can be found by searching Facebook for the event “Electric Train No. 6044”. See you in Ternopil. “Volume or death!”
Dr. Myroslav Trofymuk
Born in Lviv. Designer, director, musician, researcher, founder of ZEMLA STUDIO. Master of classical philology and digital marketing, PhD in the history of Ukrainian literature. Member of the National Union of Journalists of Ukraine. Since 2022 he has authored the CENTRUM MUNDI audio show for Polish Radio for Ukraine, continuing the same research into the contemporary music scene in Ukraine and Poland.
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