The Quietus Radio

It's been a while since we've regularly updated our Quietus podcast feed, but that's about to change. Many of you will be aware that the site is now pretty much entirely funded by our readers, with these exalted subscribers getting sent a host of perks, including what we call the Low Culture Podcast. This monthly show features tQ founders Luke Turner and John Doran discussing a cultural artefact that they love, from albums to films, TV shows, books... and even shoes. You can find the full archive here. We're going to be giving you tasters of these pods via this main feed, with a bit of a smorgasbord of shows from our archive to kick things off. So tune in to listen to excerpts from Luke and Doran praising the transcendental joy of Alice Coltrane's Journey In Satchidananda, while critiquing how its been a little coopted by gong bathers; discussing queer cruising in Joe Orton biopic Prick Up Your Ears; our love of Dr Martens boots; and there is of course some chat about The Fall. This trailer concludes with a version of the latest Low Culture Podcast, on Suicide's debut album. If you like what you hear, you can help support the work of The Quietus in providing the antidote to the algorithm by becoming a subscriber here. You can sign up with a month free to explore the huge archive of these podcasts, plus further essays, playlists and much more.
Thanks to Alannah Chance for editing this trailer, and for producing The Low Culture Podcast

The last episode of our series made in collaboration with 20ft Radio explores music trends post-Maidan and being “a rhizomatic thing” during wartime.

Why do we need labels nowadays, especially in Ukraine? Especially when the manufacturer pulps most of your vinyl debut release before it’s even left the factory? A good question, answered in part by the guests in the final Memory Leaks episode: Acid Jordan and Tofudj, from the “horizontally structured and ever-morphing” Pepe Gaffe collective in Kyiv. 

Pep Gaffe release adventurous electronic music (but not only). They once stated they were “a collective of enthusiasts who are bound to devote their lives to the grand idea of developing a music community and aspire to create a platform for sterling interaction between artists and cultural operators.” According to Acid Jordan and Tofudj, the text was “a hoax, an in-joke, and we hated it. But it all came true.”

Being music enthusiasts, producers, event curators and friends from way-back in Poltava, Acid Jordan and Tofudj are possibly the best guides you can find to the left-field sounds of contemporary Ukrainian music, and the pitfalls many currently encounter in just doing their thing. The pair talk of pulling off live events with war as a constant backdrop, and if alternative music organisations could be more decentralised, or is Kyiv still the magnet? Other topics include feeling isolated, and niche labels as “culture vortexes”, as well as the general, post-Maidan trends in alternative Ukrainian music.

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.

This is the story of how a small Ukrainian label evolved away from expectations of Ukrainian music as being all about folk music. The fourth episode of the Memory Leaks sees us stepping back into the Ukraine of the 2000s to take a closer look at the phenomenon of small indie labels and how the underground developed in unexpected ways. Our guest is Serhii Dubrowskii aka Dubmasta. Dubrovsky is a selector, producer, designer and journalist. Born in Chernihiv, he now lives in Kyiv. After starting out with various noise and hardcore bands in the 90s, Dubrovsky became a major driving force for the VzyalSoundSystem AKA VS AKA ВЗЯЛ project, one of the first electronic dub groups in Ukraine.

Serhii has been a key figure in Ukrainian urban independent music for decades, and SKP Records, the label he co-founded, is still active and well-known among connoisseurs. This year SKP celebrates its 25th year, so we look back to where everything began – in his bedroom.

Dubmasta’s wonderful tales are essentially of creative barter: from compiling cassettes of “crazy noise punk and atonal drone”, and making and exchanging CDs at parties and with contacts – sometimes for food – in the early 2000s, to building a network of like-minded artists and collaborations around the world. Along the way, we hear tales of the development of Ukrainian dub and dubstep, denim-clad cinemas, working with Genesis P-Orridge, burning tyres for fun and how the many changes in musical formats have shaped the underground. “We do not need to build a factory to make tapes!” says Dubmasta. And remember: “Russian music always sounded appalling. No-one brought Russian stuff in their DJ cases.”

Note there are silences in the broadcast.

This podcast is produced by Kyiv’s 20ft Radio and the New Voices Ukraine project is supported by the British Council and Ukrainian Institute.

In the third episode of Memory Leaks, we're moving deeper into the 1990s and the evolution of underground sound from rock to electronic. Our guide this time is Oleksii Dehtiar aka Maket, the frontman of the cult band Ivanov Down, one of the most uncompromising acts of the 1990s Kyiv scene. Oleksii will break down Ivanov Down's many incarnations, reminisce about the first Ukrainian raves and share his views on the music-making technologies of today.