For a collection of music arriving from an underground scene facing such dire straits, when the typically meager financial consequences of music making cannot be ignored, for “Sounds Of Survival From Ukrainian Underground” to be so steadfastly unusual, experimental, and sonically defiant serves in itself as a manifesto for the Ukrainian underground scene.
Describing music like this is what keeps the game of documenting music a perpetually engaging task and for that, we should all be grateful. The sounds of the Ukrainian underground are strikingly spacey and retro, outfitted like a mothership with little zaps and zings and acoustic retrofitting that continually transforms and jettisons as new terrain is encountered.
Produced by Dubmasta himself, “Version of Survival” features a stringed instrument pitch bent into an alien-like UFO tractor beam sound, verging on a theremin. Dubmasta himself is a master of the marriage of these oddball samples. On “Techno Blanco El Sueno Negro”, Southwestern guitar stylings interact in a zero gravity field with weird quasar impulses that SETI researchers might confuse for signs of intelligent life.
A few tracks off “Sounds Of Survival From Ukrainian Underground” border on the truly uncategorizable and bizarre, collaged from such disparate sources, musical styles, and sound archetypes that they confound the ear.
“Be Strong in Dub,” sounds like Godspeed You and Black Emperor teamed up with a pan flute-heavy Ska band while on vacation in Acapulco. The vocals are predominantly snarled through eddies of noise, almost like spoken word, and edged with fury. The instrumentation itself is also quite aggressive, lashing out through overdriven processing, filling the mostly low BPM grid with shifting auditory intrigue.
“Favorite Trip” is a chaotic blast of jazz and villainous crooning. According to the release notes, the lead singer, Dmytro Kurovskiy, sat in “a basement in Chernihiv in the dark, while constant airstrikes hit the city.” A rocket exploded close to his studio. The windows were smashed, but the synthesizers and equipment, thankfully for the time being, have survived the most recent attacks, as has he. Further in, we find charred guitar, singed hats, and embers of roasted synths.
“How to Burn the Demon” is, in contrast, a slick and groovy tribal techno cut, while “Hippie End” sounds like a fresh emission from the early days of modular synthesis.
It is unfathomable for most of us to create under such circumstances. Especially music that is so alive with risk and so totally against the grain of even the “anti-commercial” but still somehow standardized sounds that we expect of something labeled as underground.
“Sounds Of Survival From Ukrainian Underground” covers bases one didn’t even know existed.
-Winston Mann
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