Anti-fascism in sound part of Anton Kats aka Ilyich’s research. They take codes of music banned during the USSR to refute the international rise of fascism. Opening with fanfare full of hope and resilience, Ilyich’s Sudnozavod release is a triumph. Translated as shipyard Sudnozavod, the jazz-and-experimental-drenched album, makes its emotive intentions clear: to stoke the fire of Ukrainian and international anti-fascist resistance. Alongside a show at Savvy Contemporary in Berlin, where the Ukrainian artist opened their film presentation yesterday, Sudnozavod is an exciting listen for the anti-fascist sisterhood.
Their sound collage on Kyiv 324 makes audible most explicitly life under invasion, with recordings of air raid sirens disrupting a comfortable banal shuttle train journey. It’s bookended with a radio broadcast and clattering keys, which seem to state: this is home. Jazz tones find their way onto many tracks on the album; just before the haunting interruption (of Kyiv 324) is Planvi, which oozes cool and transports us to a buzzing club. People party when they can and you almost need it to just forget reality for a bit during war, as I have been told. Wartime get-togethers and even joy is always rebellion for the oppressed. The jazz referenced by Ilyich to paint a picture of modern resistance takes from the 50s and 70s, but the feeling is universal and timeless.
On Sudnozavod Ilyich has an interest in bones, the name for records made on discarded x-rays, which were smuggled into countries under the USSR. They are spectacular and inspiring to see. Specifically, Portrait in Jazz by Bill Evans and Birds of Fire by Mahavishnu Orchestra come up. This 70s music is tied to the vast shipyard of Kherson in the artist’s hometown, referenced by the title. Explained in the press release, “Situated in the delta of the Dnipro in southern Ukraine, it was once the largest shipbuilding site in the USSR, giving birth to Vishwa Asha, meaning Universal Hope, a cargo ship built in 1974 during the Indo-Soviet partnership. Decades later, Vishwa Asha is decommissioned or lost, a ghost ship drifting through the fractured narratives of war.” This album follows their After Hope project. Underground and forbidden sounds inspire the release with valour. Ships take on theoretical and physical shape in the album.
Tying in philosophy, Ilyich’s radio-play-like tracks (the grains) feature gentle feminine spoken word that narrate the album, threading it together. First Grain: If Life Has an End, Why Wouldn’t Death? The emotive title frames the musings on what appears to reference the ship of Theseus problem: if each component is replaced is it still the ship of Theseus? The answer? Releasing ourselves from the concept of the ship, the collapse of fixed identity lets us sail. The song is meditative. The following grains interrogate binary and rebirth. Third Grain: For Those Who Are Born, Death Is Certain, takes “The entanglement between fascist politics and regimes” and counters it “through the imagined potential of sisterhood.” They cast away dominant constructs of whiteness, maleness, straightness, and heroic masculinity. But, don’t worry, each track is short-running and there’s some girlie ASMR for Click Click. Ilyich might be a teacher — Associate Professor for Sonic and Listening Practices at the Oslo National Academy of the Arts — but they also accommodate for scroll-rotted minds.