Last Friday, which was Good Friday according to the Orthodox calendar, the Ukrainian composer Maxim Kolomiiets and the guitar virtuoso Dmytro Radzetskyi invited to a concert in the Dovzhenko Center in Kyiv.
It was an online event that you could join via Facebook, the two musicians wanted to revive their art with an improvisation session and collect money for their fellow musicians.
Kolomiiets, who stayed in Kyiv after the Russian attack and helped the army as a volunteer, explains during the video call that music can also help to overcome the horrors of war by treating fear and despair and counteracting inner emptying.
Radzetskyi, the creator of the eight- and ten-string MIDI Radz guitar, says that the instrument was both a weapon and a medicine for him at the time.
When greeting the audience, the composer notes that he and Radzetskyi first performed as a KoRa duo in Bucha, which is close to Kyiv, and which has now become synonymous with the massacre that Russian occupying forces inflicted on civilians there.
They therefore made music for the peace of the dead, explains Kolomiiets, but also for life, which must go on.
The performers abuse synthesizers, electric guitars, various percussion and a radio.
Menacing, echoing metal bangs alternate with electronic bell tones.
The light painting of a big city appears on the studio wall, which turns into a jungle thicket and then into raining rivulets of tears.
Militantly rattling attacks mix with siren ostinatos and snippets of voices from which the Ukrainian word for “death” (smert) can be heard.
This experimental musical trauma therapy stands in stark contrast to the suppression strategy of the aggressor Russia.
Prisoner vans were waiting in downtown Moscow yesterday, Sunday, to arrest or deter anti-war demonstrators.
Concerts by the rock bands Zeitmaschine and DDT were canceled across the country because their frontmen Andrei Makarevich and Yuri Shevchuk spoke out against the war.
Plays with the actress and anti-war Julia Aug were canceled in Moscow.
The school book cleansing carried out by the educational publishing house “Enlightenment” (Prosveshchenie) is worthy of an Orwellian.
According to the requirements of the publishing house management, the Ukraine and Kyiv, which is considered the “mother of Russian cities”, should appear as seldom as possible in the texts from now on.