Nitin Sawhney in new Pink Floyd recording

Disgusted by the Russian invasion, David Gilmour speaks about band’s first brand new song in 28 years, which samples a Ukrainian musician now on the front line – and expresses ‘disappointment’ in Roger Waters. The song features Nitin Sawhney on keyboard.

A couple of weeks ago, Pink Floyd’s guitarist and singer David Gilmour was asked if he’d seen the Instagram feed of Andriy Khlyvnyuk, frontman of Ukrainian rock band BoomBox. Gilmour had performed live with BoomBox in 2015, at a London benefit gig for the Belarus Free Theatre – they played a brief, endearingly raw set of Pink Floyd songs and Gilmour solo tracks – but events had moved on dramatically since then: at the end of Feburary, Khlyvnyuk had abandoned BoomBox’s US tour in order to fight against the Russian invasion.

On his Instagram, Gilmour found a video of the singer in military fatigues, a rifle slung over his shoulder, standing outside Kyiv’s St Sofia Cathedral, belting out an unaccompanied version of Oh, the Red Viburnum in the Meadow, a 1914 protest song written in honour of the Sich Riflemen who fought both in the first world war and the Ukrainian war of independence. “I thought: that is pretty magical and maybe I can do something with this,” says Gilmour. “I’ve got a big platform that [Pink Floyd] have worked on for all these years. It’s a really difficult and frustrating thing to see this extraordinarily crazy, unjust attack by a major power on an independent, peaceful, democratic nation. The frustration of seeing that and thinking ‘what the fuck can I do?’ is sort of unbearable.”

The result is Hey Hey, Rise Up!, a new single by Pink Floyd that samples Khlyvnyuk’s performance, to be released at midnight on Friday with proceeds going to Ukrainian humanitarian relief.

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Sheltering in their homes in Kyiv and Baryshivka, Ganna from the Dakh Daughters cabaret troupe and rapper Alyona Alyona speak to us about the cultural sector’s role amid the war in Ukraine. The Dakh Daughters’ participation in an upcoming theatre production in France is now hanging in the balance; Ganna tells us why the all-female punk cabaret has always dealt with politics and current events in their performances. And as one of the only rappers to write and perform in her mother tongue, Alyona Alyona explains how her Ukrainian cultural identity has become an important facet of her music.

“We can’t make any music,” the singer and cellist Nina Garenetska said. “This is our life now: An air raid siren goes off.”

For years, the Ukrainian band DakhaBrakha has ended its shows chanting, “Stop Putin! No war!” What they had protested has now come to pass.

DakhaBrakha, based in Kyiv, has long served as ambassadors for Ukrainian music and culture, at once preserving and transforming them. The group gives the polyphonic harmonies of Ukrainian traditional songs a contemporary, internationalist makeover, using African, Australian, Arabic, Indian and Russian instrumentation alongside punk, scatting, hip-hop, trance and dance influences. Their appearance has always been equally striking, especially for the three women in the quartet: towering fur hats, long matching dresses and wildly colorful Iris Apfel-style jewelry.

“DhakhaBrakha often sings about love, heartbreak or the seasons, but as stand-in for bigger things — sometimes political things — and how they do it expands upon Ukrainian traditional music that uses metaphor in this way,” said Maria Sonevytsky, an associate professor of anthropology and music at Bard College, in New York, who devoted a chapter in a recent book to DakhaBrakha and gave a public lecture Wednesday on “Understanding the War on Ukraine Through Its Musical Culture.”

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Globalfest 2019: 5 Best Things We Saw

As politicians feuded over walls, NYC revelers celebrated diversity at the annual cross-cultural bacchanal

Will Hermes – Jan 9, 2019

Dakh Daughters
An Instagrammer’s dream, this Ukraine sextet seem to have stomped out of an Edward Gorey cartoon or a Brothers Quay film, with cellos, violin, string bass, flute, accordion, guitar and a drum kit, and members in matching black-and-white leggings, goth tutus, mime-style greasepaint, false eyelashes, rouge, black nail polish, and at least one pair of skull earrings. There were plenty of headset mics to go around; headlamps, too. Oh, yeah, the music: spine-tingling Ukrainian folk harmonizing, French rapping and a reggae jam for good measure. There was a song about a cat with lots of meowing, and a risqué sort of can-can routine. The sound occasional recalled DhakhaBrakha, a previous Globalfest act that also hails from Kyiv. But the music might remind you just as much of Tom Waits or Regina Spektor.