Cassette
During the first month of the invasion, Ukrainian label We Have No Zen began work on a compilation that was to draw on the international community to show support for the local resistance that neighboured and protected their existence. Their efforts extended to a mammoth 48-song collection that, in partnership with Saga House, has now been edited down to 24 tracks for this fund-raising cassette release. There are familiar names here - Richard Youngs, Ashtray Navigations, Alastair Galbraith, Sean McCann++ - alongside a number of lesser known (at least to me) Ukrainian artists, all of whom collectively express a double-headed ideological stance of creative and moral solidarity. In their own ways and to lesser degrees of importance, these are stances predicated on survival, of self-determination, of free will. Locking yourself in a room for 30 years to make music for an audience of one isn't exactly directly equatable to fighting for the right to exist, but there's an ideological parallel that doesn't need to be explained by me. And so such a compilation feels like a fitting act of support and resistance, hands and voices in the dark reaching out across time and space, and, as it turns out, borders more important than ever. By no means immaterial is it that the music itself is vital and necessary. That might in fact be the very point. There's power in these unions.
