Acclaimed Ukrainian experimental electronic musician Heinali releases livestreamed solo performance from a basement in war-torn Lviv, raising crucial funds for Ukrainian humanitarian initiatives.

Beginning on May 10th 2022, Ukrainian musician Heinali (Oleh Shpudeiko), together with the live from Ukraine team, inaugurated a series of livestreamed performances directly from a basement and makeshift bombshelter in Lviv. Though billed as a fundraising mission, the concert series also serves a poignant and powerful window into the lives of the beleaguered Ukrainian citizens and creatives, battling the unthinkable realities of producing music in a country at war.

His most recent stream will be released as a live album by Injazero Records on October 28th. Oleh writes:

Explosions woke us in Kyiv at 4 am. That day and the following day, we did not sleep. I took several shirts, underwear, papers, and my modular system. On the road to the Polish border, my mother lost consciousness. On the road to the Hungarian border, our car drifted into an opposite lane of a serpentine, narrowly escaping lorries floating toward us half sideways in a sudden snowstorm.

We were the lucky ones. They crossed the border, and I spent the next month in Lviv as the battle of Kyiv was raging. At my friend's music school, we organised a series of fundraising broadcasts with performances of Ukrainian musicians who, like I, fled to Lviv. As the air raid alarms grew more frequent, we had to cancel or postpone live streams until we settled on broadcasting the next performance from a bomb shelter nearby.

It took two 50m Ethernet cables, coupled together and shielded from the rain with a plastic bag. And fixing the issue with the electricity. I played a set based on Organa, an album I had worked on for the past year until the Russian invasion brought it to a halt. It reimagined the XII and XIII century polyphonic compositions of the Parisian school in modular synthesis. A genuinely bizarre juxtaposition, considering the circumstances.

But when I started playing, something happened, and for these twenty minutes, I felt like I reconnected, for the first time since the invasion, with the part of myself I thought was gone for good. Tatyana, one of my friends present, put this feeling into words: “Heinali's music miraculously fits the bomb shelters and transforms them into a sacred space of Roman catacombs.”

That night I returned home and checked the news. It was the Bucha massacre. And the miracle quickly dissipated as I felt like every one of these people was me. And they were all of us.

The music Oleh produces is not overtly mournful, but a celebration of life even in a challenging and oppressive environment. A celebration of the Ukrainian people and testament to their bravery; willfully uncompromising protest music.

For the performance, seated before a compact modular rig he managed to save, Oleh coaxed airy figures based upon Medieval counterpoint into tangled thickets of polyphony and rich, thrumming drones. As noted by Philip Sherburne in Pitchfork, “In any other context, it would be profoundly beautiful; given the war raging outside, this quiet act of perseverance takes on even greater significance.” The violence being visited upon the country only makes the contemplative stillness of Heinali’s music that much more striking.

All proceeds from the live album will be donated to Musicians Defend Ukraine, a charitable foundation picked by the artist.

Bank details for donations:
linkpeak.io/l/defendukraine

Live from Ukraine production andvolunteer team:
Michael Balog, Ivan Kostyk, Alexey Shmurak, Iryna Kirchanova, Tatyana Voloshyna, Anton Hauk.