Zen Sounds 060: Oleksandr Yurchenko

The avant-garde composer was one of the most prolific protagonists of the Ukrainian Novaya Scena in the 1990s

Stephan Kunze

Jun 10, 2023

Prologue

Summer has arrived with a vengeance here in Germany’s rural Northeast; for the last two weeks, it has been nothing but sunny, dry and warm, and we’ve been spending as much time outside as possible, even though there’s so much work to do. The best thing about living in the countryside is that you don’t need to drive anywhere to be in nature – you leave your house, and you’re right there.

I’m reading a book by Welsh adventurer and marathon runner Rosie Swale Pope, “Just a Little Run Around the World”. After her second husband died from cancer, 57-year old Pope embarked on a five-year journey on foot, going through England, then central Europe, the Baltic states, Russia, Canada, Greenland and Iceland, returning to her starting point. Thanks for the recommendation to Polish travel Youtuber Eva zu Beck, whose channel and newsletter has been an inspiration for quite a while. (She’s currently on a YT break though.)

In my own running practice, I’ve made the transition from minimalist shoes to zero-drop barefoot shoes, and oh, what a game-changer. I’ve started out slowly with very short distances, step by step, and let my foot and leg muscles adapt gradually to a different type of strain. Now that my calfs have become stronger, I feel there’s nothing better than a trail run in zero-drop shoes. After a few miles, I start to feel like an animal in the wild, putting my feet exactly where I need to put them without thinking much, just flowing along the trail.

On one of these warm evenings, I discovered this compilation of unreleased material by an almost-forgotten Ukrainian avant-garde composer – and right when I found it, I knew this had to be the topic of the next Zen Sounds issue.

Oleksandr Yurchenko – “Recordings Vol. 1, 1991–2001”

(Shukai/Muscut, 2023)

Between 1988 and 1997, a rich Ukrainian underground music scene existed, concentrating in the country’s biggest cities of Kyiv and Kharkiv. It came into existence as an indirect consequence of Gorbachev’s Glasnost and Perestroika politics, and reached its peak during and after the period of collapse and dissolution of the Soviet Union from 1989–91.

In this fertile time of crisis, upheaval and renewal, the so-called Novaya Scena blossomed in the young state of Ukraine. Rock music had been demonized and deemed the artistic guise of Western capitalism by the Communist Soviet government. Freed from these ideological constraints, musicians in the former Soviet state started playing all sorts of weird stuff from noise-rock to no wave-inspired music to avant-garde improvisations. They didn’t make music for commercial reasons at all, as most of it happened live and undocumented.

One of the most prolific protagonists of that elusive Ukrainian scene was the composer, instrument-builder and illustrator Oleksandr Yurchenko. Little is known about his life and background; he is said to have been a notoriously private person, becoming seriously ill in the 2010s and passing away in 2020 without ever having spoken to a journalist. Just a fraction of his compositions have been recorded; less have been published. After a few fragmentary archival (re-)issues over the last years, the compilation “Recordings Vol. 1, 1991–2001” finally serves as a comprehensive entry point to his work.

Born in 1966, Yurchenko was in his early 20s when the Novaya Scena emerged. Co-founding and playing in around a dozen bands in the late 1980s and early 1990s, he dabbled in synth pop, post rock, industrial, medieval folk and avant-garde composition. The most prominent of his bands, in which he played guitar and hammered dulcimer, was called Yarn. Aside from these instruments, he mostly utilized keyboards, synthesizers and an electric viola in his music.

During the 1990s, Yurchenko started building his own string instruments, pretty similar to what Michael O’Shea had been doing in England. One of his first creations was reportedly made from the remains of a balcony frame, essentially just a board with four strings and an electric guitar pickup. The instrument he used on his main compositional work, “Count to 100. Symphony #1”, looked like a long zither, and he played it with a bow, tuning it in a special way while using guitar delay effects and simple loop techniques.

“Count to 100. Symphony #1” was recorded at Yurchenko’s home in August 1994. It’s essentially a 25-minute improvised drone piece, distantly related to the early works of American zither mystic Laraaji, the dark industrial stylings of UK industrial band Zoviet France and the experiments of Ukrainian violinist Valentina Goncharova. Parts even remind me of contemporary cellist Oliver Coates’s distorted drone metal. The symphony hadn’t been officially published until a few years ago; the composer just produced a few copies manually to spread among friends.

“Count to 100” was one of Yurchenko’s last purely acoustic works; by the mid-1990s, he started focusing more on electronic instrumentation, though often in combination with acoustic sounds. This style can be heard on his dark, folky and ancient-sounding album “Znayesh Yak? Rozkazhy” with Ukrainian cult avant-garde singer Svitlana Nianio, recorded in an abandoned park in Kyiv and self-released on cassette tape in 1996 (re-released in 2020 by Glasgow’s Night School label). On these eight untitled tunes, Yurchenko played his percussive hammered dulcimer, while Nianio sang in her otherworldly soprano voice and played along on a Casio keyboard. They created a magical masterpiece.

In 2001, Yurchenko worked on an edit of “Count to 100”, processing it with heavy reverb and tape loop manipulation. On this new compilation on Ukrainian label Shukai, we can finally hear the full edited version for the first time. It unfolds over 25 minutes of layered drones and distortion – a mysterious, enchanting noise that can appear quite harsh to the ear at first, but if you care to listen more deeply, you will hear resonant sound particles swirling around each other like hadrons in an atomic nucleus.

Aside from the edited version of “Count to 100. Symphony #1”, there’s four more pieces assembled on this compilation.

“Intro” sounds much gentler than the symphony; it’s a three-and-a-half minute sound experiment that was found in Yurchenko’s archive on a cassette tape containing recordings of his main band Yarn. Nobody knows where and when exactly it was recorded. It might sound like a Frippertronics-style tape loop drone, but apparently the Ukrainian composer employed a Casio SK-1 sampler and some old Soviet keyboards here.

“Merta Zara #3” is an example of the improvisational music Yurchenko played with his wife Svitlana Neznal. As a duo, they recorded a single session at their home in 1994 under the project name Merta Zara, with Yurchenko on a self-built electric viola and Neznal singing while playing a self-built mandolin. Their music was heavily influenced by the melodies of traditional Central Asian folk tunes, which Yurchenko studied deeply, and you can hear that inspiration on this five-minute outtake pretty well. It’s indescribably gorgeous. If only it was longer!

“Playback #1” and “Playback #2” are instrumental, droney pieces that were, again, found on cassette tapes in Yurchenko’s archives. They were recorded at Yurchenko’s home in 1995 and intended as playbacks for the mentioned album with Svitlana Nianio. The first playback sounds like layered loops of self-built string instruments with a female voice singing wordless vocals in the background. The second one is a short but completely otherworldly percussion piece, reminding me of Zoviet France’s late-1980s tribal ambient.

Yurchenko finally started releasing some of his recordings in the late 2010s. He had long since retired from making music and focused on his illustration work at that time, as he was seriously ill, having even suffered a stroke. His health declined more and more, so much that the Ukrainian label Delta Shock released the original version of “Symphony #1” in early 2020 to help pay for his mounting medical bills. In April of that same year, Yurchenko passed away.

“Recordings Vol. 1, 1991–2001” marks an important step in preserving this mysterious Ukrainian composer’s work. But you can also just listen to it and immerse yourself in it without considering any type of background information. Maybe that’s even the wiser way, as this music often sounds like a lost transmission from a different time, maybe even a completely different part of the universe.

One more thing

I’ve been a fan of experimental rapper/producer/artist/prankster Dean Blunt for some years. I just recently found this unauthorized documentary collage on Youtube, and I think it sums up Blunt’s work pretty nicely – not trying to explain it (which would be impossible) but instead pulling together video clips from concerts, interviews, videos, Boiler Room sessions, the iconic 1983 movie “Style Wars” and an award show presented by Jarvis Cocker.

I’m really into a lot of the music Blunt has been making, from his Hype Williams and Babyfather projects to his solo stuff – his “Black Metal 2” album from 2021 is actually back in heavy rotation on my phone. I guess he’s influenced by 20th century art movements like Dada and Surrealism, and his music borrows from hip-hop, lo-fi indie rock and punk – though I’m probably getting it all completely wrong. Again, the film below gives at least a rough idea.

“I find that people who are way too conscious of genre are usually way too conscious of race.” (Dean Blunt)

Happy weekend!