Day and night young men and women pass through the gatehouse of the ribbon factory at 31 Nyzhnoiurkivska St. in Kyiv. They are there not for the labor though, but for fun and knowledge — for almost six years the factory has been transforming into a cultural center to the beat of electronic music.
This post-industrialization showcase has been led by the same young people, without any support from the government or big business. They have rented out the rooms of the now defunct factory from a company that bought it from the state in the 2000s, before turning them into venues for music and lectures, art galleries, bars and cafes.
The Soviet government founded the factory in 1936 on the edge of Kyiv’s oldest Podil industrial zone stretching up to the north-east. From all other sides, the factory is surrounded by forested hills and Shchekavytsia Mountain. It’s a post-industrial peninsula in a sea of green.
Young energy and a unique location made 31 Nyzhnoiurkivska St. the prime hangout for Kyiv clubbers. Its parties and festivals have been recognized internationally as well, attracting lovers of electronic dance music from around the globe.
The three oldest venues that made the factory their home couldn’t be more different from each other.
Closer
Called one of the 20 best clubs in the world by the Hostelworld travel website, Closer art center gave rise to the cultural cluster on Nyzhnoiurkivska Street. It all started with a group of friends who made electronic music parties, mostly techno, called literally “Party for Friends” around Kyiv and who were looking for a permanent venue.
For a couple of years, parties by local DJs Timur Basha and Vova Klk drew increasing numbers of electronic music lovers to clubs in Kyiv. For the New Year’s celebration in January 2012, they tried something different by organizing a party at a restaurant not really intended for dancing.
Timur Basha called that party “Closer” while designing its poster — a photograph of a school of fish that expressed the sense of community among the partygoers. People loved the format, so Basha and Vova Klk made it into a series: each Closer party would take place in a new, unexpected area.
By that time, the Closer team had their own transportable audio equipment, thanks to sound engineer Sergey Vel. When promoter Sergey Yatsenko joined, the team started looking for their own home venue which they would continuously improve. Yatsenko helped with the money.
And so the Closer team found “the best possible” place within the former ribbon factory at the foot of Shchekavytsia Mountain. They first built a summer venue called Lesnoy Prichal (or Forrest Pier in Russian) in June 2013, and then the indoor Closer club in September 2013. It has been growing ever since, and now has a bar and its own restaurant.
In six years, Closer formed a circle of 12 resident DJs, including Basha and Vova Klk, and invited big names from abroad, such as Ricardo Villalobos and Marcellus Pittman. It organizes two big festivals — multi-genre Brave! Factory and Strichka for electronic music.
With its name, the two-day Strichka (Ukrainian word for “ribbon”) festival pays homage to the industrial past of the venue. The influential Resident Advisor electronic music magazine has put Strichka on the list of the top 10 festivals in May for two years in a row.
But Closer always branded itself as more than just a nightclub — it’s also an art center. In the daytime it functions as a lecture hall and an independent art gallery. Its co-founder Kseniya Malykh, 34, says that it’s an experimental gallery that exhibits new artists, unlike other Ukrainian galleries that are mostly commercial.
“The guys created Closer to bring music they loved to Kyiv, music for which they traveled to other cities. And so we curate the gallery under the same principle of sharing the art we are interested in with others — making it ‘closer,’” Malykh told the Kyiv Post.
Taras Khimchak shows the terrace of the Mezzanine art platform to the Kyiv Post on June 5, 2019, in Kyiv. (Oleg Petrasiuk)
Mezzanine
The attic above Closer is a venue aptly called Mezzanine — both for its architectural features and to be resonant with the landmark album of the U.K. trip-hop band Massive Attack. Mezzanine holds mostly instrumental music shows at night and lectures in the daytime.
Mezzanine was founded by Taras Khimchak and his friends — their Azh promotion agency needed a place to hold concerts, and Closer suggested renting the attic above. Azh organized shows of ambient and neoclassical music, bringing artists from abroad, such as Arms and Sleepers and Ludovico Einaudi.
However, after Mezzanine opened on Dec. 31, 2013, Khimchak, 32, says that for a while they could not afford to bring foreign artists, because of the devaluation of the national currency hryvnia after the EuroMaidan revolution, Russia’s war in eastern Ukraine and the annexation of Crimea.
“It became very expensive to work with foreign bands we brought here before — the price of organizing a concert jumped two to three times. So we focused on the Ukrainian bands in our own market,” Khimchak told the Kyiv Post.
Mezzanine provides an avenue for new Ukrainian alternative rock bands and some electronic music DJs, as well as for the better-known artists, like indie-pop band Zapaska. Only since 2017 Mezzanine started bringing bands from abroad when the public was again willing to pay for more expensive tickets.
As art-director of Mezzanine, Khimchak is particularly interested in organizing more lectures. Mezzanine holds paid classes on a variety of subjects: this week, for example, there are lectures on philosophy and popular music, family financial health, graphic design and kiteboarding.
The founders of Mezzanine invested a lot of money to repair the rooms that had no roof, and are still balancing financially, with some months not bringing profit, Khimchak says. But he still makes plans on how to improve the art space, one of which is creating a media archive of the shows and lectures recordings.
“Nobody persuaded us to do this. It’s a kind of an inner feeling: if you don’t make efforts — it all falls, if you do make efforts — it will all work out,” Khimchak says.
Pavlo Derhachov talks to the Kyiv Post in the Otel’ nightclub on April 23, 2019, in Kyiv. (Oleg Petrasiuk)
Otel’
When Pavlo Derhachov and Yevhen Kostenko rented out a room at 31 Nyzhnoiurkivska St. in 2013, they couldn’t imagine that it will become one of the most intriguing underground nightclubs in Kyiv. All they wanted was a rehearsal room for their indie rock band.
The room they rented was where the ribbon factory’s heating facilities used to be located. But it was all in ruin. They dismantled the pipes, demolished the broken tiles, cast a concrete floor and exposed the bricks on the walls to give the room a more natural look.
“It was voluminous, it had a high ceiling — we felt good about it. The feeling was exalting — so we thought the music will be the same. We thought with emotions,” Derhachov, 30, told the Kyiv Post.
Following the same emotional impulse Derhachov and Kostenko bought a custom-made professional set of speakers from a sound lab in Lviv. Derhachov says they wanted to do everything “fundamentally, on the level.”
About the same time DJ Slava Lepsheev came to the room curious about the sounds of construction, and offered to hold a new kind of party that he was creating called “Cxema” there.
In April 2014, both Derhachov’s electronic music venue was inaugurated and Cxema was born — a series of techno rave parties that eventually became known for being Ukraine’s most intense and featuring a unique type of dark, industrial techno.
Derhachov’s club came to be known as Otel’ — a reduction of the word “kotelna”, or boiler room in Ukrainian. Otel’ kept hosting new dance parties, and Derhachov started to embrace electronic music.
“Techno youth is more open to new things. And I started to like electronic music parties, this special way of interacting with people. And we’re still trying to make it even better,” Derhachov, now the sole manager of Otel’, says.
Otel’ kept improving its sound system, expanded with another room, a basement and a back yard. But Derhachov consciously keeps design changes to a minimum — instead of creating a glossy nightclub, he wants to keep it raw and real.
“We could paint everything black, put two couches here and an ultraviolet lamp there — and say it’s an art center,” Derhachov says. “But I hate paint — it’s as if it tries to hide something. And we have nothing to hide — everything is in plain sight.”
