New Voices Ukraine: Memory Leaks V – How a Single Radio Show Shaped Odesa’s Music Scene

In the latest instalment of our collaboration with Kyiv’s 20ft Radio we hear tales of taxi drivers horrified by music, “Baroque pop”, paying tribute to Twiggy Pop, and ask what is an Independent label, in Ukraine

The fifth Memory Leaks episode is a trip to the south of Ukraine in the 2000s and 2010s. We talk to Dmytro Vekov, a man with a “penchant for pseudonyms” and someone who admits to “keeping teenagers awake after midnight”, listening to their radios. Dmytro is host of the cult radio show Atmosphere and founder of the Cardiowave record label. Atmosphere has been on air every Thursday at midnight for more than twenty years, and played a vital role in helping younger Ukrainians find obscure or marginal music before the internet took hold. 

‘Imagine, a taxi ride just after midnight in Odesa in the late 90s. Just after a hit like Macarena has finished, and suddenly the sounds of Einstürzende Neubauten, Swans, or Coil start to screech through the speakers. The tired taxi driver stops and whispers to his passengers in horror: “I’m not going anywhere, anymore.”’.

Dmytro’s other enterprise, the Cardiowave label, emerged, like many underground cultural phenomena, out of chance meetings with like-minded people (including, it seems, lots of Cure and Cocteau Twins fans). Cardiowave is Dmytro’s name for the “chamber folk, or Baroque pop” trend in the 2000s, driven by the successful band Flëur, though, as Dmytro says, “clearly, it doesn’t explain very much at all”. The band and label began to influence Odesa’s local music scene during the following decade, with its penchant for “poetic, grotesque, sombre and ethereal” sounds and forms. We also learn of the late Maria Navrotskaya, from Twiggy Pop.