It started, as musical happenings sometimes do, with SoundCloud. About five years ago, Matt Sullivan, head of the indie label Light in the Attic, was turned on to a playlist that featured, as he recalls, “funky Seventies stuff, ambient modern classical, and disco.” A few songs reminded him of Cocteau Twins and other bands associated with the British label 4AD. “It was all over the place,” he says, “but I fell in love with it.”
The twist was that all of the songs came from the Ukraine and the Soviet Union between the Seventies and the Nineties, when the former was a republic of the latter. Thinking a similar playlist would make a good compilation for Light in the Attic, which specializes in cultish reissues and excavations, Sullivan began spearheading the project. Half a decade later, that record has finally arrived, albeit in different form: Thanks to political events out of theirs and everyone’s control, what was intended as an overview of vintage Ukrainian and Soviet rock, pop and new wave is now solely devoted to Ukrainian artists.
Billed as the first such overview of pop from that era, Even the Forest Hums: Ukrainian Sonic Archives 1971-1996, which arrives in October, remains an ear-opening collection. Instead of music rooted strictly in the folk traditions of the Ukraine, the 18-track set offers up takes on instrumental psychedelia (Kobza’s “Bunny”), Santana-style Latin pop (Vodohrai’s “Remembrance”), new age flute jazz (Er. Jazz’s “Tea Ceremony”), disco (Kyrylo Stetsenko featuring Natalia Gura’s “Oh, How, Wow?”), novelty new wave (the Hostilnia’s “Sick Song”), an ABBA-in-Kyiv romp (Stetsenko and Tetiana Kocherhina’s “Play, the Violin, Play”), and one of the most haunting folkish instrumental you’ll ever hear (Yarn’s “Viella”). Uksusnik, the first band formed by future Gogol Bordello auteur Eugene Hütz, is heard on another, bumpier instrumental “North Wind.” The anthology, arranged chronologically, offers an alternative-universe history of pop trends, and it also foretells the current state of Ukrainian music, which has broadened even further to incorporate metal, EDM, and hip hop.
Once Sullivan had heard the SoundCloud lineup, by way of his friend, music supervisor Zach Cowie, the project began in earnest. Sullivan and his team tracked down the mysterious “DBGO” who compiled the playlist, who turned out to be David Mas, a music fan in Barcelona who didn’t speak Russian. That eventually led them to Shukai Records, the Ukrainian label that suggested songs they didn’t know; the company also worked on hunting down the often obscure artists to obtain permission to license their songs.
The work dragged into 2022, which proved fateful. Just as the paperwork for the Russian tracks was being finalized, Vladimir Putin invaded the Ukraine, and those recordings were pulled from the set for sensitivity reasons. “It became a political issue, and we had to change course a little,” Sullivan says. “The music that most fascinated us anyway was the Ukrainian music, and we said, ‘Let’s make this a celebration of all things Ukraine.’ We didn’t want to disrespect anybody.” (Luckily for Light in the Attic’s budget, the Russian acts hadn’t yet been paid.) A portion of the proceeds from the album’s sales will now go to Livyj Bereh, a Kyiv-based volunteer organization devoted to rebuilding parts of the Ukraine devasted by tye war.
In addition to learning more about the musical legacy of the Ukraine, Sullivan says that pulling together Even the Forest Hums was sometimes scarily enlightening, especially when he was working with Kyiv-based writer and DJ Vitalii “Bard” Bardetskyi, who wrote the liner notes. “He’d say, ‘One of my friends just died on the battlefield,’ or ‘Our power has been out for days,’” Sullivan says. “It was endless. And I’m sitting there in Austin with my dog and my records as they’re going through hell on earth. It was hard to comprehend sitting there, but it was their reality.”