She is Ukraine’s most famous female solo artist, having gained international success after winning the 2004 Eurovision Song Contest with the song “Wild Dances,” which earned a record-high (at the time) number of points.
But these days Ruslana is spending time not on stage, but in western Ukraine, climbing 1,200-1,800-meter high mountains, sampling dairy produce made from sheep milk, (which she calls “a natural bio-stimulant”), swimming in waterfalls, petting horses, and making sheep wool blankets from scratch using a technique that is said to exist only in the village of Yavoriv, in Ivano-Frankivsk Oblast.
The singer is not on some sort of unusual holiday, but has embarked on a yearlong expedition to the Carpathian Mountains. Ruslana is recording vocals for her upcoming new album, but also trying to call the nation’s attention to this stunning region, which is sadly at risk of degradation.
New album
Ruslana dubs her new music project “metamusic,” or “music that has extraordinary properties.” She has already recorded the instrumental part of the album in Kyiv, but the vocals are all to be recorded in the mountains, to give them unique acoustic properties. The singer has a portable recording studio, which she and her team carry to different locations in the Carpathian region.
“I think we are probably the first people to set up a portable studio at a height of 1,464 meters”, says Ruslana in one of her posts on Facebook (she later made a recording even higher up, at 1,500 meters).
The other locations Ruslana has used to record her songs are the 27-meter deep Dovbush caves, which had such a high humidity that the moisture risked damaging her electronic equipment, and next to a man-made stone statue of a mother goddess called Ternoshorska Lada, which could be up to 40,000 years old.
The singer has also recorded herself in a gorge so narrow that she had to ditch most of her recording equipment and just use a microphone (but the narrowness actually magnified the sound like no amplifier or speaker system could, she says).
Occasionally the singer is interrupted by nature: she has been caught in thunderstorms and even attacked by bats. And she once had to stop a recording session because a gaggle of tourists became overexcited about seeing the star in the flesh.
Environmental mission
Ruslana is joining efforts with local and foreign ethnographers, historians, ecologists, and biologists to fight the illegal destruction of Ukraine’s highland environment. She shares heart-breaking photos and videos of the damage that has already been done – the fresh bare patches in the forests where the trees have been illegally felled.
“Even from a distance it looks like barbarism – disfigured and crippled mountains… If we continue to cut down the Carpathian forests like we’re doing today, in 10 years the Carpathians will cease to exist as a health resort,” the singer warns.
Ruslana is no stranger to environmentalism. Along with her husband Oleksandr Ksenofontov, she bought a three-floor house in 2009 that the couple has since equipped with a solar electric system. The singer regards protecting the environment as her mission.
Attracting tourists
Ruslana says she wants to create a “new vision of the Carpathians” and “to share this vision with the public.”
She encourages Ukrainians to travel around their country, and if they do, to go to the Carpathians, take off their headphones and listen to “the music of nature.” The singer also continuously emphasizes the healing powers of nature in the Carpathians, claiming that even when she feels ill, after spending an entire day on top of the mountains, exposed to nature once more, her symptoms magically disappear.
“One can only become truly stronger by merging with nature,” she says.
Her numerous videos bear her out: Ruslana’s make-up-free, gleaming face radiates happiness and energy. Her feet are bare at all times: “After a while feet get used to the surroundings, and are unaffected by rocks and spiky plants,” she says.
She is truly still wild.
