Ukrainian Ethnorave by Cmyk. Between Traditional Rituality and Electronics

The world around us is distorting and cracking like overheated vinyl, but it is precisely in these cracks that a new aesthetic is sprouting. Welcome to our cyberpunk. Here, neon lights are replaced by the dim light of an oil lamp in a Polissya peasant hut, and instead of the cold iron of neuroimplants, there is tradition, injected directly into Ableton tracks. The Cmyk project has become a main gateway through which the updated protocol of our mental autonomy flows into the system.

The Cmyk Foundation focuses on combining archaic Ukrainian elements with experimental electronics in raves, concerts, and educational projects at the intersection of different art forms. The Cmyk’s second educational project for electronic musicians was completed in February, teaching musicians to integrate traditional music into electronic music. The Education 2.0 course has outgrown its training format, becoming a full-fledged initiation intoethno-rave. In this environment, sterile high-tech sound resonated with the rough, living truth of forgotten villages.

The program was led by curators, a sound producer and multi-instrumentalist Vitaliy Symonenko (responsible for the electronic infrastructure) while ethnographer and leader of the traditional band DvaTry, Mariya Kononchuk, provided a deeper dive into tradition. Over the course of eight weeks, 23 participants explored Drone sounds and the Glitch paradigm, listened to lectures on the peculiarities of traditional music, learned ethical ways of working with music sources, and recorded sessions with traditional performers.

The researcher and performer Nadiya Khanis presented the traditional singing style, while ethnomusicologists Yevheniya Shulha and Mariya Kononchuk analyzed the instrumental heritage in detail. Electronic artist Mark Medvedev and bass guitarist of the band Subscum Nuri Ashurova were responsible for the digital side of the process and complex concepts of synthetic sound.

The result was a public showcase party. Six active participants demonstrated that archaic music, instead of remaining frozen in anticipation of researchers, could breathe, change color, and pulsate to the rhythm of modern subwoofers.

Behind each of these six soundscapes were specific musicians, masters of their own section of the sound space, working with frequencies that cannot be drowned out.

Sound as atonement

Pavlo Sidash is a visual artist whose path to music lay through the painful overcoming of postcolonial trauma. Until 2022, he existed in a safe but illusory “apolitical” paradigm, seeing no threat in consuming Russian content. However, full-scale war and his encounter with The Cmyk provoked a rapid transformation of his identity. At first, Pavlo punished himself for feeling like a hypocrite due to the rapidity of these changes but eventually found support in cultural resistance.

As an experienced web designer, he transfers graphic insights to a sound canvas, working with music as if it were a layering of textures. His method is to reject the rigid “squareness” of techno in favor of flowing melodic lines and less structure in traditional music. Having found the ideal symbiosis of singing and ambient, Pavlo deliberately left vocals of Ukrainian traditional songs that he used almost untouched. A slight echo in his final work immerses the listener in the space of mountain peaks, allowing the voice to overcome synthetic barriers.

The one who looks into the eyes of rusalkas

For Lesyk (Les Yakymchuk), tradition is not an exotic sample, but rather blood pulsing to the rhythm of the rural drum he played as a ten-year-old boy. With a background in film directing, Lesyk tends to shoot movies in the listener’s ears rather than writing tracks. He sees women with torches walking barefoot through the morning dew to chase away rusalkas.

Lesyk keenly feels an ethical challenge, to understand the fragility of sources that are too easy to distort or vulgarize. His experience working with the band Shchebit crystallized his understanding of rusalka songs as wild, tribal mysticism, far from their seemingly major-key sound. His electronic arrangements serve as a tool for strengthening tradition, a delicate balance between the author’s “I” and a thousand-year-old foundation. Listening to the phonetic differences between the singing of peasant women and those of modern Kyiv performers, Lesyk carefully reconstructs the etymology of the region, allowing original sources to dictate his arrangements.

Master of spontaneous eclecticism

For Illia Bolotov, music is a field of spontaneous exploration, where djing and jamming become tools for searching for pure and unrefined sincerity. Kaia Nashchuk’s idea(one of the project’s founders) gave Illia an impulse to transform the Ukrainian tradition into a multi-layered platform for experimentation. During the showcase, Dj ilusha demonstrated lightning-fast reactions. Catching the heated energy of previous performances, he instantly reworked the playlist, replacing the meditative introduction with an aggressive rhythmic beat.

This set became a radical manifesto of eclecticism, where the works of the course participants, the raw unreleased tracks of the curators, and the vital force of the compilations Spadok [Heritage] and Sestro [Sister] collided in a single stream. Ilya skillfully worked at breakneck speeds, stitching together disparate genres into a coherent narrative. In the context of the Cmyk project, his vision of tradition is free of prejudice — it is the living, pulsating language of the contemporary dance scene, which retains its mystical roots but sounds at full volume today.

The voice of melancholy

Ira Hoisa joined the project with experience in academic and traditional singing, which she has been doing since her student years. Participating in Cmyk Education 2.0 developed her interest in original arrangements of Ukrainian songs. Ira’s music is a cross between vocal and instrumental traditions, where melancholy takes the form of deep nostalgia.

Through her music, a performer conveys a need for reflection, often hidden in everyday life. The project became a way to “fly away” into the past to understand the present. It is an intimate dialogue with tradition, where sound is an echo of personal experience in a broader national context. This approach proves that Cmyk is not just a rave, but also an opportunity for inner silence and self-reflection.

A steppe human in the mirror of the underground

Lenochka (Olena Dzhurina) is the voice of the Kryvyi Rih’s underground. Her path to creating music through visual art became a search for new ways of thinking, and her introduction to traditional singing opened a deep understanding of music. As a human of the steppe, she consciously experiments with sources from other regions, in particular recordings by the Zbyten cappella.

Lenochka’s approach to creativity involves working with microstructures, as she builds acomplex soundscape using only one sample from the choir. For her, traditional culture is a natural environment where her identity exists naturally and without contradictions. In the Cmyk community, this connection to her roots becomes a direct experience of heritage, in which personal experience and archaism resonate in unison.

Guide to the Polissya afterlife

Sasha Sayem has a deep-rooted understanding of folklore. His grandfather’s lullabies and his teenage fascination with the album by Hulaygorod and Tartak shaped his approach, mainly conscious work with the context. Using the Polissya rusalka song “Provedu svoyu rusalochku” [“I Will Lead My Rusalka”] performed by the members of the traditional band Viltse, Nadiia Khanis and Yuliia Mykolaychuk, he builds noisy compositions, in which delicate spring melodies are intertwined with howling guitars and overloaded textures.

For Sasha, rusalkas appear as ghosts of the past, and spirits of forgotten ancestors. Resampling is the main method of his creativity. Almost all the sounds in his tracks are born from traditional violin and bubon sounds. His live performances combine shimmering ambient, harsh noise, and straight drumbeats, recreating the dramatic vibe of wedding and farewell songs. The energy of folk punk and ancient magic sound through distortion, illuminating the present with textures of the past.

Can Cmyk become a new tradition? Can this explosive mixture of archaism and digital experimentation become a stable code that we will pass on? Will we be brave enough to admit that cymbals combined with electronics are the true face of tradition in the mirror of modernity? 

Cmyk affirms a new tradition through its ability to be as authentic as possible to the original power of folklore, which was self-sufficient long before the appearance of the first sequencers. This consistency is based on the recognition of authenticity as a living, daring partner with its own wild character that rejects any attempts at domestication. We are witnessing a process in which modern electronics are only opening new avenues for the energy that has pulsated for centuries in Polissya rituals and steppe songs. Continuity here manifests itself through the shared experience of mysticism, when technology becomes a medium for the transmission of genuine, true emotion.

 

This material was created and published thanks to a grant from Music Export Ukraine, Canada-Ukraine Fund, Aid for Artists.

 

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