When Russian-backed separatist fighter Yuriy Shpakov bragged to his wife about shelling a Ukrainian checkpoint, he probably didn’t expect that their phone chat would end up in a song.
“We blew their checkpoint to pieces,” Shpakov says in the call intercepted by the Security Service of Ukraine, or SBU.
“You took it out? My good boys!” his wife replies.
Shrapnel from one of Shpakov and his men’s shells hit an intercity bus, killing 12 civilians on board and injuring another 16 on Jan. 13, 2015 near the town of Volnovakha in the Donetsk Oblast.
Then, the Ukrainian-Canadian band Balaklava Blues used the SBU recordings in their song called “Volnovakha” to expose the crimes of Russia’s ongoing war against Ukraine.
And they also combined the documentary recordings with a Ukrainian folk-inspired tune about a young woman waiting for her beloved, something people live through on both sides of the conflict.
The result emphasizes the more humane aspects of experiencing war.
“How are you?” the wife of Anatoliy Sinelnikov, a Russian colonel who supervised the shelling near Volnovakha, asked three days after the tragedy.
“My… my soul is heavy,” Sinelnikov replied.
Folk foundation
Balaklava Blues is the project of Mark and Marichka Marczyk, a married couple currently based in Toronto, Canada. But it comes from the heart of Kyiv.
Mark, a Canadian of Ukrainian origin, met Marichka, a Ukrainian, during the EuroMaidan Revolution, a popular uprising that drove Kremlin-backed President Viktor Yanukovych from power on Feb. 22, 2014.
In the days following the first killings of EuroMaidan activists on Jan. 22, 2014, Marichka performed Ukrainian psalms as a requiem for the fallen heroes with the Bozhychi folk ensemble. Mark saw the performance and was moved to meet the singers, including Marichka. The two found a lot in common.
They ended up raising money to buy first aid kits for the Ukrainian army after Russia invaded the Crimean peninsula and eastern Donbas in March 2014. Then, instead of wedding presents, they asked friends and family to donate to Patriot Defence, an NGO that provided the kits.
Patriot Defence also trained soldiers on how to use the first aid kits, a course that the Marczyks had undergone as well. But instead of taking up arms, the Marczyks felt they could do a lot more at the front with their music.
“We performed for the soldiers on the frontline. And I caught so many teary eyes. When they hear a Canadian and a Ukrainian sing thousand-year-old Ukrainian-language songs from what’s been called ‘Novorossiya’ (i. e. ‘new Russia’), they immediately understand what they’re doing there, what’s the point,” says Mark Marczyk.
The Marczyks traveled around the Donbas, performing Ukrainian folk songs taken from that region for both soldiers and locals.
Marichka is a trained ethnomusicologist who studied the song heritage of central and eastern Ukraine for 20 years with Bozhychi.
“There are thousands of songs in my head. And it’s important to bring those songs back to the place where they were taken from, for people there to hear them,” says Marichka Marczyk. “Ukrainian folk music is the foundation for everything we do.”
Marichka and Mark Marczyk laugh together as they give an interview to the Kyiv Post on the streets of Kyiv on May 17, 2019. (Oleg Petrasiuk)
Going electronic
Ukrainian folk songs are often about tragic love and suffering, so they remind Mark of the blues, hence the name of the band. The “Balaklava” part refers to one of the symbols of the EuroMaidan Revolution, the balaclava mask worn by some of the protesters. Balaclavas are meant to conceal the face, Mark says, but they actually emphasize the eyes — the “windows of the soul.”
Besides reminding Ukrainians of their musical heritage, Balaklava Blues has what they call a diplomatic mission: sharing what’s happening in Ukraine, not letting the world forget about it. To reach wider audiences with the project, they expanded into new territory: electronic music.
“None of us in Ukraine had any experience with the revolution and the war, so everyone had to learn quickly, survive and evolve.
With electronic music, we chose the form that forced us to do that as well,” Mark says. “We opened whole new worlds of musical expression.”
Electronic dance music, folktronica, neo-classical, trap, pop-rap and dream pop are a few of the genres Balaklava Blues experiments with in their debut album, called “Fly.” The artists themselves avoid specific labels and stick to a more general term “global base” — a mix of international influences.
Going further
Their biggest influence is A Tribe Called Red — a duo of DJs from Ontario that blends electronic dubstep with the music of the First Nations, Canada’s indigenous people.
Besides mixing folk and electronic music, both bands often use documentary recordings — pieces of news, dialogues and the sounds of actual shots, explosions, natural phenomena.
In “Woodcarver,” A Tribe Called Red splices together aboriginal chants and news recordings about John Williams, an unarmed Native American man killed by police in the U.S. state of Seattle in 2010. The result is a political protest against police brutality toward indigenous people.
In the song “Volnovakha,” Balaklava Blues spreads a political message against Russia’s aggression using recordings suggested by videographer Roman Liubyi from Babylon 13, a Ukrainian documentary film community that covered the EuroMaidan Revolution and Russia’s war in the Donbas. Liubyi collaborates with the band to create music videos.
For a full-on Molotov cocktail mix of folk music, electronica and documentary recordings, Balaklava Blues adds sound and video footage from Soviet cartoons.
In one music video, they use images of the Soviet Winnie-the-Pooh stealing honey from the bees, or Piglet having a gun at home — only to make the audience see how the Soviet propaganda worked.
“We tried to pick the brains of the people fighting in the Donbas — one side defending their lands from the occupier, another — fighting the so-called ‘fascism.’ Soviet cartoons and movies are one of the key pieces of their mentality. Lovely and friendly on the outside, but propagandistic and invasive on the inside,” says Marichka.
Balaklava Blues strongly believe that they should also reach the Russian audience with their music, but still they are not ready to give concerts in Russia.
An audience dances at the performance of Balaklava Blues in London in February 2019. (Nicolai Khalezin)
“We’re kind of preaching to the choir in Ukraine,” Mark says. “In theory, the Russian market needs us more.”
The band is ready to tour pretty much everywhere else to reach more people and to consolidate Ukrainians. The Marczyks say that Ukrainians are a nation not limited by the borders of the state, an idea similar to the concept of nations as “imagined communities,” developed by political scientist Benedict Anderson.
“A nation is exactly an imagined community. And part of our goal is to expand the boundaries of our imagination,” Mark says.
