“The silence of the Donetsk steppe is deceptive. Amid complete stillness, you begin to hear a powerful symphony rising from deep beneath the earth.”
One should be careful not to romanticise the Donbas. It has never been an easy place to live. As Stanislav Aseyev writes in In Isolation, “The majority of the Donbas population is made up of working-class people who tumble out of factory gates after a 12-hour shift,” while the region itself has long oscillated between industrial pride, political manipulation and violence.
“The steppe went on forever, rolling all the way to the horizon, breaking against the sky. It was an ocean of grass, shifting under the wind, smelling of dust and dry earth, immense and completely free,” writes Serhyi Zhadan in Voroshilovgrad. The landscape may appear vast and open, but beneath it lies a history shaped by coal seams, explosions, exploitation and, more recently, war. Donbas in Memoriam never loses sight of that complexity.
The opening begins almost imperceptibly. There is the crackle of what sounds like electrical discharge or high-voltage leakage before the music settles into a calm ambient landscape built from synthesisers and water recordings that initially recall vintage library music. Over this appears the voice of a Soviet documentary narrator describing the Komsomolets Donbassa mine as “a ship from the future, resting upon the frozen, gigantic waves of an ancient sea.” For a brief moment one might think the piece is heading towards a conventional documentary. It does not.
Gradually the soundscape mutates. Distortion begins to infiltrate the texture. Resonances accumulate. Electronic circuitry slowly consumes the archive until the narrator and successive generations of television reports, political speeches, miners’ conversations, church services and news bulletins lose their privileged position. Language is no longer the protagonist. It becomes another sonic material, absorbed into an increasingly dense acoustic geology.
The transformation happens without dramatic editing or sudden contrasts, the composition growing denser almost imperceptibly as spectral layers accumulate. Intensity has little to do with volume: voices occupy familiar speech frequencies while tape hiss, industrial rumble, degraded broadcasts and electronic drones gradually crowd the space around them. By the final third of the thirty-minute work, individual testimonies have become difficult to follow, subsumed into something larger until it feels as though history itself is collapsing into sound.
The effect is powerful as the archive refuses simplistic narratives. Soviet triumphalism sits alongside reports of methane explosions. Celebrations of mining records are followed by desperate appeals from families waiting outside collapsed shafts. The promises of politicians dissolve into accusations of “Liar.” Everyday conversations about fishing coexist with artillery, church kitchens and humanitarian aid. Rather than imposing a historical argument, Muzychna Shkatulka allows contradictory voices to remain unresolved.
This refusal to simplify is perhaps the album’s greatest strength. As John McDonnell – shadow chancellor during the Corbin leadership – has argued, the Donbas cannot be reduced to geopolitical abstractions. Behind every discussion about territory lies the lived reality of miners, trade unionists and ordinary families whose lives have been shaped by forces largely beyond their control. Likewise, Aseyev reminds us that understanding the region requires acknowledging its difficult social history rather than projecting romantic myths onto it. Donbas in Memoriam shares that honesty. It neither sentimentalises the Donbas nor transforms it into an ideological symbol. It simply listens.
The second track, “Improv”, performs a very different function. Built around persistent low-frequency vibration, the piece feels almost geological from the outset. Here memory seems to emerge from the landscape itself, without the archival voices of the preceding track. The music increases in density before opening up around its midpoint, only to thicken once again as resonances accumulate across the spectrum. Tension develops through the occupation of acoustic space, each gesture leaving behind a residue that colours those that follow. The subterranean pressure of the lower frequencies suggests not only the mines beneath the Donbas but also the geological history of the region.
Taken together, the two works complement one another. If the title piece excavates the historical archive, “Improv” excavates the acoustic memory of the landscape itself. One speaks through voices; the other through vibration.
Like the stark image of the Komsomolets Donbassa headframe on the cover, the EP transforms industrial infrastructure into a memorial without aestheticising either labour or destruction. Instead, it reminds us that landscapes remember. The voices may eventually dissolve into noise, but the resonance remains. As the poet Lyubov Yakymchuk wrote, “We will build another [home] in an apricot tree out of luscious clouds, out of azure ether.”
To delve deeper into the making of Donbas in Memoriam, we reconnected with Muzychna Shkatulka after having first spoken to him for the June episode of Ukrainian Field Notes.
In our previous conversation about Події, you explained that your music deliberately resisted storytelling. You even said that the pieces “mean nothing” in the sense that they do not communicate a lesson or an opinion, but simply exist as sound. Donbas in Memoriam seems to move in the opposite direction, drawing on Soviet documentaries, television broadcasts, political speeches, miners’ testimonies and everyday conversations. Yet, as the piece unfolds, these voices gradually lose their semantic function and become part of the musical texture. Did working with documentary archives change your relationship with narrative, or were you still pursuing the same idea of listening to sound before meaning?
Well, in fact, the first draft of Donbas in Memoriam had been in the works since 2023; back then, it was called Комсомолець Донбасу у Пеклі [Komsomol member of Donbas in Hell] and was fully composed by me, with no use of samples or archives. At the time, I thought of it as some kind of retelling of The Divine Comedy, but I wasn’t pleased with the results and decided to postpone it until I knew what to do with it. The original Divine Comedy plan felt stupid and insincere. The only thing that survived from the original composition is the cover of “Спят курганы темные” [“Dark mounds are sleeping”—a famous Soviet lyrical song about Donbas miners, written in 1944 by composer Nikita Bogoroditsky and poet Boris Ladogin] at the end, and all the narrative elements of D.I.M. are somewhat connected to this first version.
Time passed, my views on music evolved, and I decided to return to this project in the spring of 2026 while finishing the previous two releases. I don’t think that D.I.M. relies much on narrative, but of course, when talking about such a serious subject, I wanted my message to be clear and coherent. This release is more than sound to me; it is the only remaining way for me to return to my “home.”
The title track begins with what sounds like an electrical discharge before opening into what feels like serene library or soundtrack music. The first archival voice describes the Komsomolets Donbassa mine as “a ship from the future,” but that optimistic vision is slowly overtaken by distortion, overlapping broadcasts and increasingly unstable sonic layers. The piece never announces a dramatic turning point; history seems to accumulate almost imperceptibly until language itself begins to dissolve. How consciously did you shape that gradual transformation, and were you thinking in musical terms, historical terms, or both at the same time?
I think this gradual descent into noise is reminiscent of my own relationship with Donbas.
At first, it was this kind of magical place stuck in time after the ’90s and the collapse of the USSR; Komsomolets really felt like the beating heart of my hometown and the towns nearby—not specifically “a ship from the future,” but something close. I was a kid and didn’t notice the realities of life there—the miners’ strikes, the corrupt government, the financial crisis and its impact on the working class. The one thing I remember as clear as day is playing with toys in my room and then noticing a column of smoke rising into the sky—it was the Boeing 777 crash in Torez.
After that came years in exile, with news broadcasts about the slow takeover by occupying forces of the land that was once my home. Slowly, I started to understand that Donbas wasn’t really what I had imagined it to be, and that feeling is also present in the final audio work.
You grew up in the Donetsk Oblast, and throughout our conversations you’ve often spoken about perception rather than memory. Listening to Donbas in Memoriam, I was struck by the fact that Donbas is neither romanticised nor reduced to a symbol of war. Instead, it emerges as a place where Soviet industrial ambition, miners’ everyday lives, political violence and geological time all coexist. Was it important for you to resist the tendency to turn Donbas into either a nostalgic lost homeland or simply a battlefield, and instead preserve its contradictions?
Yes, it was really important. As much as I love fiction in art, I just can’t stand anything overdramatic or pretentious. I’ve had all the time in the world to make sense of what Donbas really is.
When talking about this release with Zakhar [Zakhar Tovstoluzkyi who plays drums on the intro and main part], he said that he had always thought that “Donbas has an immaculate vibe for scary stuff.” I, of course, get it—the mythology of eastern Ukraine, and the Donbas region in particular, is full of chthonic symbols and dehumanising imagery. Even the first line on this release says, “The silence of the Donetsk Steppe is deceptive…” (just a totally normal romantic phrase about the nature of the steppe). But for me, it is also a place of comfort.
So I tried to split the music evenly between my personal, nostalgic view of the region and the truth of what it became over the years. I wish I could say that it was only russia’s and Yanukovych’s fault that Donbas ended up under occupation, but I personally knew people who voluntarily supported the DPR and the armed takeover of mines. It was hard to realise that the source of this evil lay much further back in time than 2013, or even 1991.
The second piece, “Improv”, feels almost as though the archive has been buried underground. Human voices disappear, replaced by low-frequency vibrations, distortion, sonic assault and immense, slowly shifting sonic masses that seem to echo the geological instability of Donbas itself. Was the idea always to balance the documentary dimension of the title track with something more elemental, allowing the landscape to speak through sound rather than through recorded testimony?
No, it happened suddenly one evening while I was working on the D.I.M. title track. I was getting more and more frustrated with it, so I closed the project and improvised this piece in one take, enhancing it with effects afterwards.
I would say that the title track functions as a journey through the history of the region; it reaches places I never could and tries to tie it all together with present-day reality. Because of that, “Improv” operates purely through my memories and is functionally powerless; there are no words or personalities, no facts or concrete dates. It’s all just a mash of memories and feelings that had been accumulating unresolved for years. And I don’t think this music resolves them either.
Since writing this review and conducting the interview, the second track, “Improv”, has been removed from the album, although it appeared on the original release.
(Gianmarco Del Re)