Blackout Tape: Documenting Post-2022 Ukrainian Scenes
Published July, 2025
by Olena Pohonchenkova
The first release by 20ft Records, a label started by Kyiv’s independent station 20ft Radio, invites artists to recreate their music-making process during blackouts.
In the winter of 2022/2023, the perception of blackouts in Ukraine gradually changed from a shock to a routine that you built your daily life around. Surreal photos of megapolises submerged in darkness and the melancholic testimonies of their citizens trying to keep up with energy-demanding 21st-century life, having no electricity, Internet, and oftentimes even cellular network for up to 8 hours a day are the testaments of those times. The blackouts came in waves after massive infrastructure shellings. The latest of them happened in the summer of 2024 when, according to Ukrenergo data, electricity outages in Ukrainian households made up almost 2,000 hours (per year). As I’m writing this now, in June 2025, the news about Russia planning new massive attacks on Ukrainian infrastructure appears across several Ukrainian news agencies’ Telegram channels.
As it usually happens in a short-attention-span-driven media memory, the media’s response to the first blackout wave became a blueprint for the representation of blackouts as war politics. During the next ones, however, Ukrainians have built a network of short-term alternative energy sources, be it rechargeable ecloflow stations or gasoline-driven generators, that kept the processes going. An energy to keep an energy, a kind of meta-technology framing our coming back to a technology-driven world and our common use of it.
In its first release, Blackout Tape, 20ft Records, a newly launched music label from Kyiv-based 20ft Radio station, asked Ukrainian musicians, mostly from the electronic scene, to provide tracks created without electric input and electronic treatment of any kind.
“The idea of a label has always been a possibility for the radio, but it only appeared now because we have our first release and need to catalog it somewhere”, shares Misha Bondarev, one of the 20ft Radio founders and its program director. “During blackouts, when the electricity would go out for 8 hours, I started playing acoustic guitar a lot again. I was surprised by the changes in my approach to music making after many years of working with electronic music, and I became curious about what ‘post-apocalyptic’ music would sound like if the electricity suddenly went out.”
Blackout Tape begins with a textured loop of a flimsy wood sound, perhaps a door or a rocking chair, that transports the listener to an air-filled room with spare piano motifs and vocalizations that gather sporadically and fall apart, leaving a feeling of something important being missed between the barely distinct lines. The track is called improvisation for voice and piano, and its author, Maryana Klochko, has been capturing Ukrainian and European audiences with her unique approach to songcraft for many years now.
“Everything in this piece is not perfect”, Klochko comments, “the recorder was too close to the piano and too far from the voice, there were glass candlesticks on top of the instrument, which started to resonate and make noise from low frequencies, the pedal creaked, the chair creaked, and on top of everything, I didn’t quite hit the right notes, but it still sounds good in the end. Or at least, it doesn’t sound bad… That’s what I love the most about music: sometimes it just ‘happens’”.
Klochko is a musician of ‘happening’, of ‘being in the process’, mostly known for her delicate yet intense live presence. A few years ago, when asked about ‘records’ in an interview for my fanzine, she was hesitant: “I used to have this concept of not making final versions of the songs for the release straight away because they change all the time. Imagine that you meet a friend and then you fall in love with them, but you had this long friendship before that. This friendship is the time when I’m not releasing the songs: I look closely as they change, sometimes even spoil… just like relationships…” Starting a compilation with a work so full of hesitation and minute imperfection (the pink noise on the recording is so strong, it sounds almost like a ceiling fan) from someone so reluctant to be recorded seems critical in opening the liminal space 20ft Records is aiming for.
Deep into the tracklist, there’s another piano piece, mouchette, that echoes improvisation for voice and piano, yet in a fully realized, elaborate way. Composed by another female producer, noorj, it makes one think of Alban Berg and his soulful yet cerebral expressionism. Crimea-born and Kyiv-based, noorj is probably the only musician with an academic background on the compilation, and surely the only one making a living from music, namely as a piano and solfège teacher. She used to play bass in a grindcore band Subscum, is the vocalist of a shoegaze project almaz, and a producer of immersive downtempo under her own name.
With no means to turn to any of the non-academic genres she roams so freely, noorj is left one-on-one with her compositional skill, and in the strings and piano of mouchette, maybe or maybe not named after Robert Bresson’s meditation on anguish, it shines starkly and beautifully. “I think the music speaks for itself, there’s direct emotion and a lot of pain, which is expressed through the melodies and harmony”, shares the composer. “The two-time form in this case serves as a fatal element”.
Blackout Tape is a record of mirrors, echoes and repetitions that shed light on various micro-scenes and ways of musical thinking. The futuristic, death-of-rave perspective of Native Outsider, a producer working in breaks and UK garage field, is the most compositionally straightforward yet lacking the joy of letting go, so critical in building “dance music” euphoria. Instead, his track, a well-fed sleep, is the blackout seen from space, clubs in Kyiv’s Podil neighborhood standing empty, bearing the mere traces of pre-war party life.
The poetics of empty spaces resurfaces in Radiant Futur’s life induction. The duo is famous for peculiar samples and their noisy yet gentle treatment, so the track begins with field recordings and synthetic sounds (or natural sounds similar to them) blending into a noisy net that seems to be breathing naturally as if moved by wind. Although containing aquatic and airy samples, somehow the track still sounds urban, Kyiv-urban-like even, bringing to imagination huge halls of modernist buildings filled with water and grass growing from concrete.
Another pair of tracks comes from the Odesa scene: although each is distinct in sound and style, nontification by Bryozone and six ways of looking at walls by Polje bear the unmistakable traces of psychedelia and the stumbling grooves the Southern sound is known for. Bryozone’s wet and rusty soundscapes sound like coming from a long-lost tape found in an iguana lair at some crumbling Bangkok villa. Her trademark dubby sound and polyrhythmic sensibility shine through the minimalistic setup and refract in various sampled textures.
Percussion is the key to the unplugged sound world of Polje. The trippy abstract loops conjure the claustrophobic feel of the evening on the eve of another possible shelling that happens so frequently in the producer’s native city. The dynamics are almost machine-like, but there’s a feeling of warmth in the repetition, like in a human imitation of the mechanical work, or a fickle heartbeat.
Since its launch in 2016, 20ft Radio has played a major role in shaping the music communities of Kyiv and beyond. The station broadcasts from a repurposed port transport container and has been having ongoing open calls for shows and mixes of any genre and concept since forever. The container is located in a small garden of a former brewery in a Podil’s club cluster and hosts daytime parties and concerts there on weekends.
The radio team has always been aware of the challenges the independent music community faces and reacted to critical events: during the lockdown, for many Ukrainians who cared about the scene, watching live streams from the container has been the only way to stay put; soon after the start of a full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine the radio launched Grains of Peace project, a series of mixes for soothing anxiety and fear; currently they’re curating o0series where local electronic musicians and visual artists join forces in re-imagination of a radio mascotte, 20ft Dino and fundraising for volunteer organization Kyiv Angels that help the military and civilians close to the frontline. With Blackout Tapes, they continue to search for answers to the questions forming within the community.
The release was curated by 20ft team members Misha Bondariev and Dania Holovko: each of them reached out to 5 artists they would be interested in hearing on the record with a set of rules: each of them had to recreate the blackout conditions while working on their tracks.
“All the artists approached the task differently, Bondariev comments, “some took the ‘rules’ very seriously and literally recreated the conditions for the creative process, completely depriving themselves of electricity and recording the track on a dictaphone from one take, others processed the resulting recording to one degree or another, but overall the result was a fairly authentic document that corresponded to the spirit of the times”.
tofudj, one of the ideologists of the 20ft friendly label Pep Gaffe and a curator of the cutting-edge event series Miasma of the Real, produced the record’s grim centerpiece. Ironically titled vechirniy kyiv (‘an evening Kyiv’ in Ukrainian), similar to an old Ukrainian newspaper or a box of chocolates, it is literally a recording of a Kyiv evening in 2025, during one of the frequent Russian drone attacks. Muffled sounds of explosions coming from air defense, the mosquito-like sound of a Russian drone, the car alarm that goes off and doesn’t stop, staying there as a part of a menacing soundscape. The recording lasts only 6 minutes, but being in one room with it after hearing those same sounds during many sleepless nights, the deathmongers’ sounds cleaned of their meaning, feels too weird. I wonder if it would have any effect at all on someone completely unfamiliar with them.
Another pre-recorded piece chosen for the compilation without any additional manipulation comes from undo despot. At once postapocalyptic and primordial, it’s a fragment of jam in Odesa Monster Castle, an old villa turned into a base for the volunteer organization and a cultural hub. “It’s an archival recording from 2023,” the producer recounts, “of a jam following a lecture on electroacoustic music. Ten musicians sang, played the trembita, the membrane drum, and flutes”. In a way, this pre-war recording holds almost an archeological quality, like some ancient nomads’ music engraved in stone.
On the bright side of things, there’s a raga mantra from Tongi Joi, a psychedelic duo from Kremenchuk that feels at ease with acoustic instruments and doesn’t perceive the unplugged concept as a limitation. Coming in waves of soft acoustic guitar chords, flutes, and repetitive monk-like singing, it is a reminder that whatever happens, there’s still light coming from the sun, and lots of it. A friendly reminder that all the proceeds from the compilation will go towards a charitable initiative aimed at installing solar energy systems in regions that suffered the most as a result of the Russian occupation.
During the winter 2024/2025, an installation named Fight for Light was put up at Kontraktova Square, next to the Kyiv Mohyla Academy. It was a transformer from one of the Ukrainian electric plants that was hit by a rocket: gargantuan and rusty, about 5 meters high, it stood there like a sleeping beast, a part of a greater structure that affects us all yet remains unseen. Seeing it, I couldn’t help but think about electricity as a metaphor for life, the bloodstream of the human world. rassle!, a Blackout Tape track by another member of Pep Gaffe collective, Acid Jordan, reads freely into that metaphor. It’s a wobbly, misshapen, and hazy composition, with bits of a conversation that never starts and an all-encompassing mechanical noise. If a cable moves inside a lift shaft and no one is there to hear it, does it make a sound? Guess it makes a rassle.
Text by Olena Pohonchenkova
Photos by Ivan Samoilov, 20ft Radio
This article is brought to you as part of the EM GUIDE project – an initiative dedicated to empowering independent music magazines and strengthen the underground music scene in Europe. Read more about the project at emgui.de.
Funded by the European Union. Views and opinions expressed are however those of the author(s) only and do not necessarily reflect those of the European Union or the European Education and Culture Executive Agency (EACEA). Neither the European Union nor EACEA can be held responsible for them.