Various Artists: Even the Forest Hums: Ukrainian Sonic Archives 1971-1996 Album Review – Warungku Terkini

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.