BAND OF THE WEEK: Heinali

Live from a bomb shelter in Ukraine.

As you might have noticed, I often time the Band Of The Week feature to be as close to the date of the release of whatever it is I’m talking about as possible (that’s why it’s published on a Friday which is when most albums are released these days), so you don’t get that “I’m so cool and I get promos so here’s something you’ll need to check out in two months” kind of thing which I understand can be annoying, or on the contrary some awesome album that came out in February, which is not so bad, and will happen sometimes, but hey. Band Of The Week lives in the now as much as it can, much more than any other feature of The Devil’s Mouth. Another characteristic that I try to imprint in not just Band Of The Week, but in pretty much everything I write here, is to provide it with a sort of insulation from the bad parts of reality that we already face everywhere every day, even if a lot of the music has those themes all over it. I’ll never claim to be apolitical and I will never hide my position on every social/political/human cause and struggle that I support and that is relevant, mind you. I’ll never use the “it’s all about the music” trope to give anything sketchy a pass. But yes, I do like the focus to be on the music, in a balanced, responsible and aware kind of way, but still. The music.

Sometimes, however, those paths cross in such a way that is undeniable, and that is what has happened with our featured artist for this week. Heinali, aka Oleg Shpudeiko, is a Ukrainian electronic music composer and sound artist who writes music for games, films, performances and other media. I discovered him a few years ago, with the first collaboration album he did with the wonderful poet and spoken word artist Matt Finney (you might know him from several other incredible collaborations like It Only Gets Worse with Maurice De Jong for example), ‘Conjoined’, released in 2011 via the severely missed Paradigms Recordings. I remember when one of their subsequent collaborations was released (2017’s ‘How We Lived’, the most recent one), it was album of the day on Bandcamp and on that review by Noah Berlatsky he said they “don’t so much mix genres as they flatten them into a single drone”, which is a really cool way of describing the unique kind of strange, shoegazy, melancholic, electronic landscape these two unique artists are able to create when they get together. Anyway, from that moment of discovery on, I have followed Heinali’s output, a following which naturally started to include a heavy-hearted dose of worry when the wretched invasion of his country began. As a true artist, he has been fighting and resisting using his own talents and tools. Since May, he has been performing occasional livestreams directly from a basement/makeshift bomb shelter in Lviv. You can watch the first one right here:

Now, the most recent of these streams is being released as a live album by Injazero Records, today, and we’re able to stream it in full via Bandcamp, the link is below. But first, let’s contextualize this properly.

“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,” the description on Bandcamp reads. As I am privileged and lucky enough to be completely unable to understand and say anything relevant about this horrid situation, I will just let Oleg himself describe it to you, in his own words that accompany this release.

“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 press release continues:

”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.”

It is noted that “all proceeds from the live album will be donated to Musicians Defend Ukraine, a charitable foundation picked by the artist.”

So listen to it - because it is also, in the end, fantastic music - and contribute however you can. Links below. Thank you.

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

Bank details for donations:
https://linkpeak.io/l/defendukraine
Trusted news sources:
https://cutt.ly/CAxbPxE

You can find Heinali on Bandcamp, Facebook, Instagram, SoundCloud and heinali.info.