Related Articles
Eugene Hutz still owns his copy of “Slayed?,” a 1972 album released the year he was born by the British bad boys Slade that his father purchased on the Ukrainian black market. Its spine is now lined with tape, its cover deeply ringed by the record inside. But for Hutz, 52, it remains a powerful talisman of rock ’n’ roll’s transformative potential, even amid oppressive regimes.
“Enthusiasts knew their way to the black market, and my dad was an extreme enthusiast — a translator of Western culture, a spiritual seeker,” Hutz said of his father, the musician Sasha Nikolaev, during a recent phone interview. “My dad played it endlessly. I was born and raised to the sound.”
Hutz emigrated to the United States in 1990, and played in various groups before the raucous band Gogol Bordello made him a rare stateside emissary of Ukrainian rock. The scene in his homeland is getting a bigger spotlight on Friday with “Even the Forest Hums,” an 18-track compendium of wildly diverse Ukrainian sounds (including Hutz’s minimalist teenage band, Uksusnik) that pulls back the curtain on a quarter-century of pop, post-punk, disco and experimental music largely made under Soviet control.
The set is part of an ongoing rediscovery of Ukraine’s musical heritage, catalyzed in part by Russia’s 2022 invasion of its western neighbor.
“When the war started, I had phone calls from international journalists: ‘Who are you, Ukrainians? What is your music?’ Nobody was interested before,” the journalist, filmmaker and record store owner Vitalii Bardetskyi said in a video interview from Kyiv. “Ukrainians were asking themselves the same questions. In the past two and a half years, Ukrainians found out more about ourselves than in the previous 30.”
Bardetskyi, who grew up in western Ukraine in the ’70s, was long frustrated that so many bands of that era had been forgotten in the post-Soviet sea change. In 2020, he released a documentary about the music called “Mustache Funk,” which referenced the facial hair and rhythms those acts often shared.
While Bardetskyi worked on the film, a trio of Ukrainian record enthusiasts — Dmytro Nikolaienko, Sasha Tsapenko and Dmytro Prutkin — were trawling their country’s archives, looking for obscure gems. “I realized there were artists that weren’t famous when they created their albums,” Nikolaienko said in a video interview from Amsterdam. “At some point, I realized there might be something missing in Ukraine as well, this lost heritage.”
During the last five years, that hunch and the group’s subsequent digs have exposed free jazz, electroacoustic composition and film-score experimentation in nine volumes on their imprint, Shukai. It is Ukraine’s first expressly archival label; its releases are jarring reminders of the creative explosion that happened as the Soviet Union wobbled and collapsed.
Four years ago, Matt Sullivan, an owner of the long-running archival label Light in the Attic, asked Nikolaienko and Shukai for help. A collaborator had sent him a two-hour mix of songs from the U.S.S.R. that did what he hopes all his label’s releases do: rearrange the way he thinks about sound.
“I hadn’t really thought much about music from that region during that period — how dumb on my part,” Sullivan said in a video interview, grinning from his Austin office. “But it was all these sounds I love — ambient modern classical, funky ’70s jazz, early almost-indie rock. I started thinking about how to bring this to fruition.”
Sullivan was stunned to learn the mix had been compiled by an engineer in Barcelona, David Mas Erliso. Neither had substantial connections in the region nor spoke the languages, but the people at Shukai did. With the support of Sullivan and the Los Angeles D.J. Mark McNeill, the label began reaching out to other imprints and artists, drafting licensing agreements for a massive trove of music mostly released before the Soviet Union splintered.
The moment Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022, McNeill was in a hospital bed, awaiting ankle surgery. The invasion footage felt like a fever dream. Some of the licenses would have to come from Melodiya, the state-run Russian label founded in 1964 that has steadily been excavating its enormous archive for two decades. That now seemed untenable.
“We thought the concept of resistance and resilience and artists operating under those conditions was really good,” McNeill said. “But that was a point where I thought, ‘What are we looking at with this project more broadly?’”
The small team began to sort through the artists one at a time, then realized they were already in talks with a strong cadre of bands from or in Ukraine. With a bit more digging, the entire project could document the country that had been thrown into crisis.
“Somehow we ended up as a national heritage label at the moment, which is fine,” Nikolaienko said, laughing. “It’s not that we’re super nationalist. But in this specific time, when there’s a war on Ukrainian identity, it’s important to highlight these bands. Some of this music didn’t pass Soviet censorship, so now we can show the world the real sound of our country.”
“Even the Forest Hums” pinwheels between sounds and scenes. Krok, a Kyiv supergroup, conjures surrealist soft jazz with lurid keyboards swiveling inside a seductive rhythm. Sugar White Death, or Cukor Bila Smert, sounds like the band David Lynch might have tapped for an especially sinister “Twin Peaks.” And the composer Valentina Goncharova — whose ingenious experimental soundscapes have earned recent acclaim through dual Shukai anthologies — combines flute and bells to add an edge to New Age serenity. Under Soviet control, Ukraine’s sound was never still, safe or steady.
Hutz recalled that his own early ambitions were small — to make music in illicit university basements and bohemian hideaways, part of an aggressive post-punk scene he and friends called “deep drill.” A fabled Sonic Youth show in Kyiv in April 1989 showed him strange music could thrive anywhere.
“We were not creating products,” Hutz said. “It was aimed to just levitate above reality we despised.”
The team behind “Even the Forest Hums” spoke of it as only an entryway for sharing Ukrainian’s musical heritage. Hutz, who has just completed a memoir about rock in the U.S.S.R., rattled off a half-dozen bands that could have been included, like the radical post-punks Brian Eno once courted, Kollezhskiy Asessor, or the ultra-angular Ivanov Down. “The music flourished after I left,” he said. “They weren’t dilettantes anymore. It just became powerful.”
There’s a backlog of material Shukai wants to release, and the label is actively sorting through long-buried tapes, listening for composers who, like Goncharova, stretched the limits of song or bands like Radiodelo who repurposed Soviet menace.
Nikolaienko breathlessly remembered stumbling upon a 1976 festival performance from Shapoval Sextet, where the band reached the ecstatic heights of spiritual jazz. Their track “Oh, Get Ready, Cossack, There Will Be a March” is a compilation highlight, the band finding a beautiful seam between Miles Davis’s electric ensembles and ESP-Disk’s explosive gusto.
“It was too different from what we have in the official archives,” he said. “It was a missing link in understanding our heritage, our culture.”
<
