If you were a Cold War kid, growing in the sunset of the Reagan years, what did you know about Ukraine? Maybe you knew about the reactor in Chernobyl that irradiated half of Europe, and that scene in Seinfeld where the fur-hat-wearing Ukrainian smashes Kramer and Newman’s game of Risk! on the subway (“You not say Ukraine weak!”). Maybe you saw, in the 1994 Olympics, Nancy Kerrigan finish second to Oksana Baiul, a waifish orphan turned figure skater who came from that newly independent ex-Soviet country. If you were born an American millennial, did you hear about the Ukrainian revolutions? There was the Orange Revolution in 2004, and the Maidan Revolution in 2013. Did you know what all those massive crowds of Ukrainian citizens were protesting for, or against?
Now we all know more about Ukraine—but Russia’s brutal full-scale invasion of 2022 has flattened it again, into a site of ongoing tragedy and/or wartime resilience. If you, like me, have been paying close attention to Ukraine for years, you have been sick with worry over the damage and loss of this unjust war, over the existential threat it poses to this place, but also over the ways it has again reduced Ukraine to a collection of stereotypes and catastrophe. All of which is why the new, lovingly curated collection titled Even the Forest Hums: Ukrainian Sonic Archives 1971-1996 arrives as both a sonic balm and a reminder that Ukraine is not merely some liminal backwater. The ambition of this musical anthology is vast: to recuperate, rehabilitate, and celebrate experiments in Ukrainian popular music in their full and wild complexity.
A collaboration between the indispensable crate diggers behind Shukai (meaning “to hunt, or search”), a reissue label founded in Kyiv in 2018, and Seattle’s Light in the Attic, the anthology gathers lesser-known works by Ukrainian musicians who operated in the murky spaces between official and unofficial culture in the last decades of the Soviet Union. The liner notes, written by veteran music journalist and tireless Kyiv-based impresario Vitalii “Bard” Bardetskyi, emphasize the power of music over the vicissitudes of a Ukrainian history marked by Russian imperial repression, Stalinist famine, war, mass population transfers, and the ebb and flow of Kremlin laws restricting or criminalizing expressions of Ukrainian language, faith, and music. Bardetskyi, in addition to co-owning Kyiv’s hip audiophile bar and record store GRAM, wrote the script for the 2020 documentary Mustache Funk, which narrated the history of Ukrainian pop in the ’70s with the sensitivity evident in the liner notes for this anthology. In Bardetskyi’s narrative of late Soviet to post-Soviet Ukraine, no musician is shamed for their participation in the culture of Soviet officialdom. No one is accused of selling out if they played in a VIA (“Vocal Instrumental Ensemble,” the bloodless bureaucratic Soviet term for what we would otherwise recognize as buttoned-up rock’n’roll). Instead, Bardetskyi offers a redemptive storyline for ex-Soviet citizens, pointing out how Ukrainian musicians managed to write catchy and sometimes profound songs even within the restrictions set by the state. And, as Mustache Funk emphasized, they often did it with a lot of luxurious facial hair.
The images that accompany the attractive vinyl package for Even the Forest Hums are taken from Maria Prymachenko, Ukraine’s most celebrated “naive” artist. The cover image is the 1982 anti-war painting known by the title A Dove Has Spread Her Wings and Asks for Peace; the back cover features 1978’s May That Nuclear War Be Cursed! Prymachenko, whose home museum outside of Kyiv was destroyed in the first days of Russia’s full-scale invasion, has become an icon of Ukrainian resilience in recent years. Prymachenko is an example of an artist whose bold experimentation—sometimes championed by Soviet art critics, sometimes repressed—has been integrated into the complex inheritances of contemporary Ukrainian society. This attempt at integrating a messy history is reflected in some of the musical choices, too. “Oh, Get Ready, Cossack, There Will Be a March,” from the lost tape of the Shapoval Sextet’s live performance at the 1976 Donetsk Jazz Festival—which was originally found and then released by Shukai in 2020, and features the unique timbre of a Soviet electronic organ—transmutes an anti-imperial and centuries-old Ukrainian epic song into, as Bardetskyi says, “true spiritual jazz” reminiscent of Pharoah Sanders’ Karma or John Coltrane’s A Love Supreme.
There are plenty of revelations here. Ihor Tsymbrovsky’s ethereal falsetto in “Beatrice” (1996), set against a piano both campy and plodding, is haunting. But the biggest surprises in this anthology come from the women whose careers Shukai has helped to recover in recent years. The “sound mantra” of Valentina Goncharova’s “Silence” (1989), composed of reverberant bell tones that echo, fall, and weave into occasional ocarina-like whistles, suggests the repetitive gestures of New York electronic minimalism. The understated sexiness of Svitlana Nianio’s “Episode III” (1994), with its hypnotic vocal melody, reminded me of Nico, had she sung an octave higher. Nianio, a member of late-’80s Kyiv underground darlings Cukor Bila Smert (Sugar White Death), is also featured in a song from a 1990 cassette that demonstrates some of the fetish for East Asian mysticism and Slavic folklore that flourished in the youth subcultures of the late Soviet period.
Overall, the curatorial taste tends towards the atmospheric. If you came looking for bangers, you might find yourself instead seated on the dancefloor, swaying to the cyclical hippie rhythms of Er. Jazz (short for “Erotic Jazz”) and the recurring flavor of flute solos. The audacious task of trying to capture a quarter-century’s worth of a country’s lesser-known musical output in one anthology means that completists might contest some selections and gaps. The two-chord jam of “Yarn” (1992), despite its use of folk hammered dulcimer, is repetitive; the ambient track “Barreras,” from Spanish-born Ukrainian diaspora musician Iury Lech, slows the pace. Uksusnik, meaning “vinegar,” was the first teenaged band of Eugene Hütz, who grew up in Kyiv’s Obolon’ district (the “Bronx of Kyiv”) before coming to the U.S. and making a splash with the Slavic punk band Gogol Bordello. Uksusnik’s song “North Wind” embodies the sound of a band’s tender first attempts to make rock’n’roll; the track appears on CD and digital releases but couldn’t be included on the vinyl release due to format constraints. Such small discrepancies between the tracklisting on vinyl and CD, and annotations in the liner notes, can make for an occasionally confusing listening experience. But the broad sweep of the anthology—from state-sanctioned folk-rock to disco, exotica, musique concrete, and jazz in many guises—offers a breathtaking introduction to Ukrainian music’s scope and diversity.
Logics of the Cold War often parsed the world into opposing categories. The evil empire was over there; the good empire, I guess, was over here. Multihued, uninhibited artists taking risks here; grayscale, top-down stylized culture there—or, perhaps, underground subversive stuff so threatening to power that it actually toppled the USSR. But of course it was never that simple. As this remarkable archival dive shows, even the Ukrainian musicians who became famous for recordings of highly regulated, state-sanctioned pop, released on the monopolistic Soviet record label, were also freaking out at jazz festivals that were never supposed to be recorded for public consumption. As the legendary Ukrainian musician Sashko Pipa once told me in an interview for Tantsi, a book I wrote about the first Ukrainian punk band, even when things were bleak or bleaker, musicians in Ukraine have found ways to make the music they wanted to hear. This anthology’s rare and eclectic songs refute convenient stereotypes and ought to remind us not to get too complacent about music’s strange power. Even slow, shimmery songs can be defiant. Even ostensibly apolitical dance music is a reminder of the people who made that music, people who refused to be silenced and dehumanized by the unfair circumstances of their place in the world.
