A Ukrainian Fusion Band Made an Album During the War — On the Frontlines

For anyone who loves free-form avant-jazz, Hyphen Dash’s new album, Basement 626, will strike the proverbial experimental chord. Over its 17 tracks, drummer Myshko Birchenko and guitarist/loops player Yevhen Puhachov stretch out into trippy, airy new-age jazz and misty-mountain soundscapes, conjuring the improvised, on-the-fly fusion instrumental records they grew up with.

But for anyone who loves the genre, there’s also a major difference. The album was recorded about 10 miles from the frontlines of Ukraine‘s war with Russia.

Long before Russia invaded the country in 2022, Ukraine had been a base for homegrown versions of punk, indie-rock, hip-hop, and EDM. It’s also fostered an active scene of underground experimental musicians brought together by Fusion Jams, a music collective that’s been hosting sessions in Kyiv bars and studios since 2019. Among its participants and co-organizers is Birchenko, a 29-year-old drummer who first started playing Green Day covers in local punk bands before being introduced to improvised music thanks to the likes of drummer Mark Guiliana (the award-winning percussionist who played on David Bowie’s last recordings).  

Birchenko juggles several hats: studying government management at the local university, co-running the indie label No Time for Swing, and playing drums for Ukrainian pop star Nadiia Volodymyrivna Dorofieieva, a.k.a. Dorofeeva (who comes across like the Tate McRae of her country). In 2019, he and musician friends also started Hyphen Dash to explore their love of free-form music that broke free of pop constraints.

Merely playing that music was a statement in itself, says Marc Wilkins, who is directing a doc, Louder Than Bombs, about the Ukrainian music scene. “In the Soviet Union, jazz was seen as a symbol of Western decadence and ‘bourgeois culture,’” he says. “After independence, it became largely associated with older generations — a music of the past, for people who smoke cigars and wear bow ties. For Misha and his friends, all in their mid to late twenties, it was a major challenge to reintroduce jazz and instrumental improvisation to a younger Ukrainian audience. It’s a perfect example of what defines a certain part of Ukraine’s national music scene: the transformation of a once-suppressed genre into something vibrant, independent, and utterly inspiring.”

Last November, Birchenko says he and other musicians made a supportive visit to soldiers in Kramatorsk, the city in eastern Ukraine that has been slammed repeatedly by Russian forces. (In 2022, more than 50 civilians, including nine children, were killed when Russian missiles struck a train station.) On a tour of a house where one soldier was stationed, Birchenko was taken into its basement. “I said, ‘This room has great acoustics,’” Birchenko says in fairly fluent English. “He said it was because the owner was planning to make a theater in the basement for his family and did some acoustic corrections.

“I said, ‘Wow, it should be great to record an album here.’ And he said, ‘If it’s not a joke, I will do everything on my side to make it possible.’ The military support those projects much better than civilians do. The military says, ‘Okay, let’s do it tomorrow.’ They know we live one day, and maybe tomorrow we will be killed by a rocket or some flying shit.”

Taking his friend up on his offer, Birchenko and Puhachov raised $4,000 with the help of the Music Saves Ukraine initiative. “When Hyphen Dash approached us with this idea, we immediately said yes, as it combines everything we believe in and explores the ever-growing importance of music at times of war and distress,” said the organization’s Mariana Mokrynska in a statement.

After driving six hours from Kyiv to the house in Kramatorsk, the musicians would eat and sleep on its ground floor and record music in its basement. (Hyphen Dash has other members but the group limited the trip to those two.) “I was super-afraid about my team, to be honest with you,” says Birchenko, who also brought a video director. “In Kyiv, you don’t feel any connection to the reality. It’s not real enough. We were super afraid about which music we would make. It’s totally improvisational music, and it takes time. We had to be calm and take a deep breath about us.”

Wilkins and another filmmaker, Vadik Pinyagin, would be the only other two people in the basement with Hyphen Dash; Wilkins admits the mood was fraught. “Despite having been in Ukraine since the full-scale invasion began, I had never been this close to the frontlines,” he says. “We were staying in a house where an active soldier was stationed, which clearly made it a potential target. I was nervous.”

Setting up their guitars, drums, and laptop in the basement, the two spent nearly a week recording 300 hours of freeform jams, many of them one take. Instead of bringing sheet music or demos, they decided to interact with soldiers and the community and make music inspired by it. One of the album’s most intense tracks, “Moto,” conjures the intensity of Red-era King Crimson and was subconsciously inspired by the soldiers around them. “They have this vibe of tough men, and we decided to play something like this, accidentally,” Birchenko says. “We said, ‘Okay, it will be a rock song.’” (He also says the album did not result in any noise complaints from the neighbors. “Maybe because we lived in a military house,” he laughs.)

Since the basement had a window, the musicians could hear artillery shells in the distance, although those sounds miraculously aren’t heard on the album. When they ventured outside, they saw bombed-out buildings, and Puhachov was once jarred by the sound of a very close bomb. (“I was relieved to have a spot in the basement to sleep,” says Wilkins.) At the same time, Birchenko would take morning runs to a market and find locals talking about tomato prices. “No one’s screaming about Putin and the war,” he says. “They basically get used to the bombs every five seconds.”

Sales of Basement 626, which is named for the telephone code in Kramatorsk, will go toward military and civilian rehab centers in Ukraine. Hyphen Dash also has an album of composed music in the wings, and Birchenko admits to a degree of urgency. Thanks to his university enrollment, he can avoid military service only until he graduates in a year and a half.

“You don’t have any ways to protect yourself from mobilization, but at the same time, you do a lot of things to support the army,” he says. “It’s super strange. But we will do our stuff to support our people and to spread awareness about war. A lot of people around me are super exhausted and upset with the news. I decided to act, and the only way is to bring some support to the militaries and raise money. I will do so until the war will end.”