It all began in Ternopil... no, scratch that: it all began back at Lviv railway station. This year’s Hamselyt festival, held for the third time, kicked off with an unscheduled stunt by the HOMEPLAYING project: a pre-party on the Lviv–Ternopil electric train. Everyone travelling to the festival from Lviv started hammering away while still in the carriage. The idea behind this musical shock therapy was to promote electronic music; the second motive was to make the almost three-hour journey more fun.
On the train the members of HOMEPLAYING — Andriian Veremiienko, Taras Shpot and Myroslav Trofymuk — got out all their battery-powered sound-making devices, laptops and guitars, and began to accompany the clatter of the train. As always, anyone who wanted could join in the musical fun, and some did. Those who wanted to, however, were outnumbered by those who didn’t. The keenest to play was a Roma man with an accordion, who nonetheless didn’t dare join in. Instead he kept glancing in bewilderment now at us, now at the other passengers, not understanding what was going on, and waited politely for the previous musicians to finish their set at last so that he could play too... When he realised we had no intention of stopping, he still found a gap to get through his repertoire and then melted away into the carriages beyond.
Warmed up and ready for new musical adventures, the Lviv contingent, with no inkling of what lay in store, calmly set foot on Ternopil soil and headed for the festival’s first venue. Where? Bunkermuz, of course. Musical suspense hung in the air of the place, heightened by a cover hiding the outlines of all kinds of musical machinery. Everyone was techno-moving to Lawrin’s music and waiting to see what would come next. What came next was Woo York. Two words are enough to describe them best — “professionalism” and “drive” — without any pathos, superfluous epithets, elaborate descriptions, parenthetical clauses or any other syntactic and lexical turns.
Woo York are Denys Andriianov and Andrii Vanzhula, a duo from Kyiv of whom, I honestly confess (and I am deeply ashamed of it), I had never, ever heard, although the name did seem familiar. Later I will try to look them up on the internet but, to my great surprise, will find nothing. Their music, though, told me more than any Google search, so I decided to put things right and talk to the guys about music in Ukraine.
– You’ve been behind the decks for seven years, you play top-quality music and play it very professionally, yet nobody in Ukraine has heard of you. Why?
Denys: – Well, that’s normal. We hardly ever play in Ukraine. Though there is information about us on certain specialist sites.
Andrii: – There are interviews.
Denys: – Interviews — how many are there, though... One, for a Moscow club: we played there, and they interviewed us. That was the first interview in I don’t know how long... We started out playing at the Cinema club, mostly hard techno there, 140-plus... harsh music. Then we heard completely different music and somehow switched over. We went to Kyrychenko’s NexSound festival, and straight away everything in our heads turned upside down; two or three weeks later we’d written a few experimental tracks. We simply discovered something new.
– I’ve just been talking to Kyrychenko, and he says Ukraine has a problem with experimental music, which is why he, by contrast, is moving from experimental music towards dance music...
Andrii: – Actually, the music we played yesterday we could just as well have played in an experimental key.
Denys: – Let me put it this way. We used to party. At first we just wanted to get our kicks; our attitude wasn’t very serious — it was more about wanting to stand out. Now it’s the other way round: everything’s different, serious and thought through.
– So when was the turning point, after which you realised: that’s it, time to work at a serious level?
Denys: – Ha, the thing is, there wasn’t a turning point. It’s just evolution, and at some point you start seeing everything differently. Maybe because we grew up. We have lots of friends who started out with us, but today they’ve moved away from it, and those who carry on playing approach it quite differently. We, for example, don’t hang out, don’t go to parties. If you hang out and network, of course you get invited, but I couldn’t care less.
– You get invited to play outside Ukraine, but you don’t play in Ukraine. Why is that?
Denys: – Who knows. In Ukraine it’s turned out that the commercial side is what matters. In Kyiv, for example, there are successful people... not even successful, rather well known, because everyone has their own idea of success. We never set ourselves the goal of being invited everywhere; for me success is releasing my music on vinyl — we’ve always been moving towards that, I’ve always dreamed of it. Digital releases are fine, but music on vinyl is serious; if you’re serious, your music comes out on records. Over the past two years we’ve had 15 releases on vinyl.
– Where exactly have you released?
Denys: – On various labels, mostly in Europe. Right now we’re running the label Planet Rythm. It’s a label with a twenty-year history. It was founded by Glenn Wilson, a respected London DJ and producer in his day. Later the label came under the control of Triple Vision Record Distribution. We’ve now completely changed the design, totally overhauled the whole visual side, including the look of the records, and we’ll try to develop it with fresh energy — with new musicians. After Wilson left, the label slowly began to rot, because Triple Vision presses records, they have 200 labels and several records come out every day, so they have no time to look after each label. Apart from that, we release on Soma Records, for example. Daft Punk released their first single on that label. Of course we’d like to play live more; the desire grows and grows and grows, you wait for the breakthrough, but it all depends on certain factors. There are cool, respected labels — if you release on them, your music gets played and people know you — but if you come out on some “hyped”, that is, hyper-popular label, that guarantees you popularity straight away. As a result, you get tours straight away.
– Did you study music anywhere or are you self-taught?
Denys: – All self-taught. I went to music school. Played the saxophone. That probably gave me some background. But I work as a programmer.
Andrii: – You could say we’ve been into music since childhood. I was interested in hip-hop culture, I breakdanced. We had a rap group in Kremenchuk. I made the backing tracks, a friend wrote the lyrics, and that’s when I started getting to grips with samples and with various bits of software.
– Would you say you make a living from your music?
Denys: – Not at all, absolutely not. How can we earn money from music if this year, counting today’s show, we’ve had five gigs? And all of them were in Kyiv, and now in Ternopil. Nobody in Ukraine is prepared to pay normal fees. We bring about 50 kilos of equipment with us, each piece costs over a thousand dollars, and if you name an average European fee, say 1,000 euros, it’s obvious that nobody here will pay you that kind of money... Yet there are a few DJs who don’t have a single release, who play other people’s music that everybody likes, and those DJs get invited all the time because they play popular tracks. Some people call that the alternative. The question is: an alternative to what? To the music videos on the M1 channel, maybe (laughs).
– Where did your music go down best?
Denys: – In Berlin. Definitely. People there experience music completely differently. Last year we were in different German cities three times, and in every city people were thrilled, went wild... Not because we’d come — they just have a completely different way of experiencing music. The way our blokes go to the bathhouse or to play billiards, and families go to concerts, over there they go to a party. So there’s a completely different culture of listening to this kind of music. Not like here — a disco for kids or for junkies, no. On the dance floor there you’ll find a granddad, a family with children — two daughters, one 16, say, the other 20 — and they haven’t even come to dance: they’re just chatting, hanging out and listening to the music.
– Tell us about your setup. Which synths do you use?
Denys: – We have the synths we play and try not to add to the list. We break a track down into loops and assemble the loops into a session in Ableton Live. Andrii plays an analogue synth and uses a Maschine sampler; a lot of what he processes comes back to me, and we sync it all with the new Roland 909... What you get is a sort of morphing of live synthesis in real time, though we also use samples and prepared loops... Andrii Kyrychenko played an Octatrack today — I thought about buying one too, but it’s very convoluted... We could chuck out everything we have and buy an Octatrack: we’d spend more than a thousand dollars, and what would we get? Nothing. Well, you’d get rid of the laptop on stage, but you can’t see mine now anyway. There are, though, snags with this much hardware. You bring everything, unpack, plug in, test it: everything works. But when it’s time to play, half the gear won’t switch on (somebody has unplugged something), and you’re on in two minutes... a heap of cables, you start searching, and it turns out somebody has taken the socket too... it’s like that all the time. Octovan came over. Their rider specifies UPS units for every instrument — not just free sockets, but a separate UPS for each synth, plus ten sockets. And nobody even goes near their setup: they take the covers off the gear, plug in and play.
– Are there any predictions that in a few years things will be the same with music here as they are in Europe?
Denys: – I don’t know if they will. Right now the action here is on a different front, and I’d like everything to sort itself out there; as for music, I don’t particularly worry about it. Of course I’d like to play more, but I think even more about writing new tracks. Probably if you hired someone to keep phoning round and pitching you to clubs, you’d be invited more often. But on the other hand, we don’t want to play in clubs where people don’t get us. Whether clubs where people will get us will appear here is hard to say.
So much for the forecasts from Woo York. You can cry, you can laugh, you can delete all your music software and sell all your instruments — but you can just as well carry on confidently building electronic music culture in Ukraine, so let’s move on.
The first day of the Hamselyt festival ended with a set by DJ Ole-Ole. The second day was supposed to take place at an industrial venue — one of Ternopil’s factories — but things didn’t go to plan. The organisers had to move the festival’s main day to a less industrial but no less derelict venue that until recently was called the Comedy Night-Club. To make sure it really hammered, the tone for the second day was set, as an aperitif (heh-heh), by the Ternopil band ZSUF (I mentioned them in my piece about PreFEST). The guys put on an extraordinary pyrotechnic show: there was fire, sparks, angle-grinder cutting... in a word, Rammstein are jealous of Ternopil.
Sommer was there too — the alias of Serhii Letov. Serhii has been making music since 2011, and at their core his compositions are the most varied rhythmic masses. I’m sorely tempted to call Serhii a Ukrainian Aphex Twin, but I won’t go looking for parallels; I’ll just say that Ukraine has its own quality IDM, and that is what matters most.
Who said only men can make electronic music? I don’t think anyone did, but even if someone had blurted out such nonsense, Anna Bryzhataia is living proof of how absurd the claim is. The most interesting thing is that Anna has two projects: Anniebri and Bryozone. The first is acoustic and the second, as it happens, electronic. I might add that Lviv audiences have had the chance to get to know both of Anna’s incarnations: she gave an acoustic concert at Dzyga and an electronic one at 61 Fredra Street.
On the same day at the Hamselyt festival you could also hear the man to blame for the festival, the one who produces most of the art in Ternopil and without whom it is doubtful whether there would be any electronic music in these parts at all. Motoblok is the solo project of Yaroslav Kachmarskyi. After Electrostatic Death, founded in 2004 and made up of Yaroslav and Roman Stets, broke up, Motoblok became the logical continuation of Yaroslav’s musical career. His sound is a mix of industrial, techno and lo-fi.
And probably the most eagerly awaited set of the second day of Hamselyt was by Andrii Kyrychenko, who presented his new project, RAYZ. For me personally, the most interesting part of the set by one of the pioneers of Ukrainian electronic music was his experiments with vocals. Male and female vocal parts and spoken phrases fed through a looper created a dense psychedelic atmosphere. Next, a few words about what Andrii Kyrychenko has prepared for us.
– Tell us about the new project you presented today.
– At a certain point in my musical career I realised that, besides enjoying making experimental music — unusual, ambient sort of stuff — I also badly needed to make something more human, more alive, more danceable (if you like). And I actually started doing it.
– What prompted you to do that? Perhaps the fact that ambient doesn’t really go down well in Ukraine?
– It definitely doesn’t go down very well in Ukraine, a hundred per cent. There’s another negative factor here to do with promoting this kind of music: it’s completely absent from TV channels and radio — practically non-existent. Dance music, of course, is easier for people to understand, because it’s present in the media and in clubs. So I tried to make dance music that would also be experimental.
– You’ve been in the music industry for more than ten years. From your own experience, why is it so hard for experimental styles of music to develop in Ukraine?
– You know Maslow’s pyramid: on the lower levels we have the need for safety and food. It seems to me that in Europe there are many people whose most basic needs are already met, and they can afford to develop their creativity, afford to sponsor new music, new digital, contemporary art. In Europe there are countless grants that keep this art alive. In America, incidentally, the situation with this kind of music is rather similar to Ukraine’s, but America has a few more foundations supporting contemporary art, whereas we have one or two.
PS. Let’s not end the article on such a sad note, because there is one more day of the festival ahead — though it too has a sad tinge, being the last one this year. The final day of the festival, again by tradition, took place in the courtyard of Bunkermuz. Two sets were on the programme: Subprodukt, a project you know, I hope, which I have already written about in connection with PreFEST, and HOMEPLAYING. The last day of Hamselyt is interesting above all for its lack of limits, since everything ends in a collective jam session. Subprodukt — Tymur Skorbenko, Andrii Kapusta and Roman Stets — presented an interesting programme with elements of noise. The most fun was watching the guys coax sound out of a heap of wires and buttons that had once been a music keyboard, or perhaps a children’s synthesiser; in this disembodied form, the little bundle of wires, hooked up to a Krona battery, produced the most unexpected sounds... Tymur Skorbenko, as he had promised, finished his little synthesiser built into the body of a Soviet Elektronika computer, and even let Taras Shpot have a go on it. In this symbiosis Subprodukt and HOMEPLAYING merged into one. HOMEPLAYING, for their part, took the city apart and tried to show its industrial architecture, to convey the spirit of workshops, plants and factories, of the vast expanses of an industrial zone, melancholy and dreamy in its noise. Then came the jam session — where Sommer particularly stood out: after playing another set in the courtyard, he also gave a masterclass, surrendering his instrument to the mercy of all the musically savvy, electronically erudite citizens who appreciate good electronic music.
We’ll have to end on a sad note after all, because another Hamselyt festival is over and the next one is a whole year away; but the spirit of electronic music will hover over Lviv and Ternopil all that time, reminding us where Galician electronica lives these days.
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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