Even the Forest Hums Showcases Little-Known Ukrainian Music

In the documentary Even the Forest Hums: Ukrainian Sonic Archives 1971-1996, made to accompany the Light in the Attic compilation album of the same name, journalist and narrator Vitalii Bardetskyi traces the contours of what he calls a “sonic terra incognita” of archival experimental music. Produced against the grain of the state-sponsored Soviet recording industry, Bardetskyi explains, the music on Even the Forest Hums contains stylistic myriads. Experiments in jazz, funk, rock, disco, and electronic music sit side by side, self-contained vignettes that come together to build a bigger picture of cultural turning points. 

Though too eclectic to fit a stifling single narrative, this carefully curated group of tracks has a clear perspective as it celebrates the abilities of Ukrainian musicians to find alternate modes of creating in the face of top-down restrictions and disenfranchisement of productions that don’t suit the interests of the corporate nation-state. It’s a struggle still relevant half a century later, within and beyond Ukraine. As Bardetskyi notes, Even the Forest Hums shines a light on this range of musical movements in the context of the current Ukrainian resistance to Russian invasion.

On its surface alone, this album is a crate digger’s dream. Comprised of 18 gorgeous rarities, it doesn’t so much sprawl as build, never flat but instead rising and falling in different and complex shapes. It’s exciting to move from track to track, to hear change and continuity interwoven. The folk-inspired jazz (or perhaps jazz-influenced folk) of Kobza’s “Bunny” feels vastly different from yet complementary to the sparse twinkles of Valentina Goncharova’s minimal, electroacoustic “Silence”.

The bounce of Kyrylo Stetsenko’s lively disco beats on “Play, the Violin, Play” makes for a pitch-perfect counterpoint to Tetiana Kocherhina’s silken vocals. In the ow-key synth track “Sick Song”, duo Hostilinia offers a similar contrast but with chilled-out 1990s hip-hop vibes. Krautrock tendrils drift through Omi’s smoky “Transference”, much as Ihor Tsymbrovsky’s falsetto vocals do over the insistent keys of the closing neo-classical/free jazz track “Beatrice”. These are genuinely heady combinations, spectacularly executed.

More abstract than the quality and variety of the music but no less palpable in making Even the Forest Hums an enjoyable listen is the care inherent in the album’s curation. Detailed liner notes place each track painstakingly in context. Iconic folk-inspired art by famed Ukrainian painter Maria Prymachenko adorns the packaging. There is simply so much here, in so many modalities, that it practically creates its own affective gravitational field. 

How could it not? At its core, this record is devoted to a few decades of underrepresented Ukrainian music, but not in isolation. As the documentary mentions, this is music inextricable from its global context. The artists featured here listened to the world via radio and the circulation of physical media. Their works reflect this just as they reflect the life experiences of the musicians as they are situated in 20th-century Ukraine. Indeed, this latter aspect affords the music here some specifics that set Even the Forest Hums apart from other archival compilations. It is the sense of interconnected local and worldwide scenes and communities, though, that make this music an antidote to top-down industry structures of all kinds.