When Oleh Shpudeiko bought a handheld recorder to capture the sounds of his hometown, Kyiv, it’s unlikely he imagined the significance those recordings would one day take on. It was 2012, and Shpudeiko, who makes experimental electronic music as Heinali, was interested in the concept of acoustic ecology—that is, the relationship between a place, its sounds, and its inhabitants. Recorder in hand, he roamed the city in search of its “soundmarks”: birds twittering in O.V. Fomin Botanical Gardens; the distinctive bleeping of the cash registers at Silpo, a Ukrainian grocery-store chain; the nighttime ambience of Borshchahivka, a bedroom community full of aging khrushchevkas, low-cost apartment blocks common across the former Soviet Union. Shpudeiko kept recording over the next decade, building out his soundmap as Kyiv underwent radical changes in the years following the Maidan Uprising. Then, in February 2022, Russia invaded Ukraine, shredding the normalcy of daily life—and along with it, the familiar fabric of Kyiv’s soundscape.
On Kyiv Eternal, Shpudeiko folds his archival field recordings into a love letter to the city of his birth. The album was inspired by a trip back home after briefly fleeing Kyiv’s air raids, in the initial phase of the invasion, to take refuge in Lviv. “Kyiv was more alive than ever, but I wanted to protect it from harm, to console it,” he says. “This was a city where I had spent 37 years of my life. So this album became a hymn to this part of my identity.” That “hymn” takes the form of a luminous web of atmospheric abstractions interwoven with processed piano, wordless voices, and synthesizer.
The album proceeds as a loosely structured travelogue. It begins with “Tramvai 14,” sourced from recordings Shpudeiko made on Kyiv’s light-rail tram system: The doors chime; a station announcement plays in Ukrainian and English; an overdriven stream of what might be pedal steel, reminiscent of Brian Eno and Daniel Lanois’ Apollo: Atmospheres & Soundtracks, extends like a pastel fog over the rattle of train wheels. There are hints of history embedded in the reverie: The English-language announcements, added when Kyiv hosted Eurovision in 2017, offer a glimpse of the city’s contemporary self-conception as a part of Europe. “Stantsiia Maidan Nezalezhnosti” goes inside the Metro stop at Maidan Square, where footfalls and the sounds of the subway are faintly audible beneath a warm, vaporous drone. Shpudeiko doesn’t dwell on the many associations that might attach themselves to Maidan Square: the “Revolution of Dignity” in 2014, which expelled the Russophilic president Viktor Yanukovych; the many city residents who took shelter underground in early 2022, turning subway stations into subterranean tent cities. The atmosphere is hazy, almost blissful, like a freeze frame of a shoegaze song.