Recommendations from the Kyiv Independent — for the music lovers from Francis Farrell (Patreon)

This is Francis Farrell, reporter here at the Kyiv Independent, coming to you today with my first recommendation for the community in quite a long time, and one that I'm very excited to share.

This one is for the music lovers — especially, perhaps, classical music lovers — but it's not some old composer from the 19th century. It's a good friend of mine.

But before we get to that, let's start with a story.

In October 2023, I was walking in the Carpathians, climbing a mountain from the charming little town of Kryvorivnia, up into the hills for a day. I was listening to a playlist I quite enjoyed, featuring Ukrainian ambient experimental music on Spotify. There was a track there from a young Ukrainian composer called Natalia Tsupryk.

Now, I don't even remember what that track was at the time, but I had a look at her profile on Spotify and just started to play her most popular pieces. I noticed that many of them seemed to be connected to Russia’s war against Ukraine. There was one called “Kyiv,” one called “Mariupol,” one called “Enerhodar,” and I thought that was interesting — so I started listening.

Then there was one track that started playing just as I was beginning to get a little tired, and the sun was rising higher in the sky. It had this very soft piano and enchanting humming, playing several chords over and over again in a way that sounded both tired and sad, but at peace.

I looked at what the song was called — and it was “Beyond the Cemetery Wall.”

At that moment, I was completely captured by this music — thinking about where we were at that point in the war, just after Ukraine's failed counteroffensive had finished. Thinking about what the future was going to bring. Thinking about the few friends I had already lost, and about those the composer had probably lost, who inspired her to write this music. But at the same time, feeling calm about my — and our — role in this struggle going forward.

It sounds extremely sentimental and over the top, but these chords, these textures, this voice — just seemed to match it perfectly.

That was when I went down a rabbit hole and listened to more and more of her music, which similarly captured for me — without words, with traditional and electronic instruments often combined — what I was feeling during this war.

Natalia is classically trained in piano and violin, and her music is built on that classical foundation — though it often incorporates electronic and ambient experimental elements as well.

Although she comes to Kyiv quite often — including last summer, when she came to organize the production of a new theater play based on Ukrainian folklore with her original music — she’s normally based in London, where she not only writes but also records all her original music herself, using various string instruments, piano, and synth.

If you're into that kind of thing, I really recommend checking it out.

The following spring — that is, spring last year — something quite amazing happened. My colleague Olena Zashko and I started filming a new documentary, my first ever, about Ukrainian military medics. The film later became “Can You Hear Me?” and was shown in over a dozen European countries.

Since Natalia and I had followed each other on Instagram, I just had this thought: It would be hard to imagine someone better placed to compose music for this film. So I wrote to her, we had coffee, and she quickly agreed.

And so, within less than a year of discovering what ended up being my most-played artist on Spotify, we were already collaborating — I was commissioning original music and giving feedback. That was pretty special, and it was a great success. We used one of her existing tracks, called “I Walk and Shamble Beyond the Cemetery Wall” — a development of the one I previously mentioned — and she wrote some more minimal, original tracks to fit other scenes in the film.

I honestly couldn’t imagine the final product without her music now.