“The main reason this recording exists is to talk about the wartime experience and to renegotiate Ukrainian identity on our own terms,” says electronic musician Heinali, aka Oleh Shpudeiko, about Гільдеґарда (Hildegard), the album he and singer and musician Andriana-Yaroslava Saienko released earlier this year. The Hildegard of the title is Hildegard von Bingen, the 21st Century’s favourite Medieval polymath nun, whose compositions they reinterpreted with modular synths and Ukrainian traditional singing.
Saienko and Shpudeiko met through a mutual friend in 2023, although he didn’t know then that she was a singer. “Only afterwards, when I was looking at reels on Instagram, and saw that she did authentic Ukrainian singing did it click that this could be a really good way to approach Hildegard’s music,” explains Shpudeiko. “I’d been thinking about how to approach it on and off for 10 years.”
What Shpudeiko saw in Saienko’s traditional Ukrainian singing was a way to bring out the physicality of von Bingen’s music. “Ukrainian traditional singing is really connected with the earth and body,” explains Saienko, “and this kind of physicality can be a really good expression for this way of praying, because of course, Hildegard is praying.”
Shpudeiko found connections between this physicality – the way traditional singing is delivered in ‘full voice’ – to his experience of a missile strike in Kyiv, and the instruction before angelic visions: ‘do not be afraid’. He had evacuated his mother from Ukraine in the first days and weeks of the invasion, and later returned, first to Uzhgorod, then Lviv, finally returning to Kyiv after the Battle of Kyiv, with missile strikes still a frequent occurrence. His studio was near a Russian target, and while he was there, a missile hit nearby. “It’s something that you can’t really put into words,” he says. “It’s like nothing I’ve experienced before. You first notice it with your body, not with your mind. With very loud sounds usually the first thing you notice is the sound. But here it’s a sense of dread, then you realise there are vibrations, and a huge explosion coming. It’s something I remembered very vividly. But for a lot of Ukrainians now, it’s a completely mundane thing. They would say, come on, that’s not really even an interesting experience.”
The physicality of Saienko’s singing combines with the powerful low end of his modular across three tracks: two pieces by Von Bingen plus a Ukrainian folk song. Together they conjure a thin space between the past and the present, between medieval spiritualism and the existential weight of war. On opener “O Ignis Spiritus” Saienko’s voice soars, cutting a path across a resonant space, with Terry-Riley like synths gathering in shimmering cumulus, as if the air is about to be rent by a sacred presence. The second piece, ‘O Tu Suavissima Virga’ leans into the fragility of the voice, coupling it with a low vibratory bass, a sonic impression of a body and a warhead that is deeply affecting. The folk song is a bonus track, a song from the Polissia region that narrates a conversation with an oak grove in which it is asked why it rustles so noisily. In the original, the oak grove replies that it cannot be quiet, there are Tatars marching through, in Saienko’s version, they become Muscovites.
Saienko’s background is in classical music – she graduated from the music academy in Lviv as a flautist and had trained in singing in theatre settings – but had a lightbulb moment around 2019, when training with the singer Uliana Horbachevska. Now, she lives in Brno, Czechia, and sings in various projects, as well as teaching singing.
Shpudeiko has been working with modular synths for seven or eight years, “It was a bit tricky to get [synths] into Ukraine, because we didn’t have a huge modular scene back then,” he says. When he eventually got hold of one, he found he could port over generative polyphony and monophony from early music, loosely following the rules of medieval organum (where a voice is added to plainchant). This led to his album Madrigals, then a live show called Organum which has toured fairly widely but never been recorded (“a good approach to take in the age of Spotify and streaming,” he says).
Their live show, which is scheduled for Le Guess Who in November (around appearances in Lisbon and Wroclaw, at Unsound New York and elsewhere) is set up as a “structured improvisation”, of all three pieces. Occasionally they add an acapella encore, in which Saienko performs a lullaby from her grandmother’s home region, sung from the perspective of a young widow singing to her baby, thinking about all the work she has to do alone. “It narrates her inner questioning. She is asking: what should I do? I tried to connect it with the fact we have a lot of women in Ukraine now who have lost their husbands.”
Shpudeiko says that while touring, he meets people in Western Europe who find it difficult to believe he is a Ukrainian refugee. “People won’t believe I’m from Ukraine,” he says, which he thinks is partly connected to society’s ingrained ideas of what a ‘refugee’ looks like. With Hildegard, he wanted to resist a Western idea of Ukrainian identity, but also the simplification of it that happened in the wake of the war at a state-level, and also the stereotype of Ukraine that was still lingering from the Soviet era, that cast it as a safe, agricultural place. “The music flees dominant structures while still working within and around them,” he says. He is often asked why a Ukrainian would be interested in the music of Hildegard von Bingen, despite the fact she was from relatively nearby in global and cultural terms. “This question should not exist,” he says, “because Ukrainian culture is part of European culture, but in the imaginations of a lot of people, it’s still not – they think that we are separate.”
For Saienko, it is less a question of identity than of deeply spiritual and existential questions she faces when she sings. “I can’t separate myself from the process – I can’t stay distant, because distance feels false to me. I need to be fully present on stage. Every time I sing, I search for a new meaning — what am I singing about today, what wants to be sung through me and through this material right now. Of course, the piece itself already carries so much within it, because it’s a prayer, about the glory of God. But for it to be alive and filled with spirit, I have to be alive and filled as well.
“Right now, I’m in a period of spiritual rethinking – in some ways rebellious, but driven by a desire to deepen my understanding rather than to diminish it. So, this kind of singing – this very embodied prayer – it feels like the most honest expression of what I’m experiencing, both in the context of war, and also as a human being; as a woman trying to make sense of how to be human in such inhuman conditions. And it leads to, I would say, a sense of ‘praying in fire’.”
Heinali and Andriana-Yaroslava Saienko play this year’s Le Guess Who festival in Utrecht this November, for more information, please visit the festival website. Гільдеґарда (Hildegard) is out now via Unsound’s record label.
