European premiere

An air of mystery surrounds Ukrainian artist, musician, and singer Svitlana Nianio. A mainstay of Kyiv’s independent music scene of the 80s and 90s – most prominently with four-piece chamber band Cukor Bila Smert – Nianio’s minimal, slow pop for piano, voice, and electronics rings out with deafening clarity and subtle introspection. Although Nianio’s first “official” solo album, Kytytsi,was released in 1999, her back catalogue is an overgrown garden of underground cassette rarities. One of her first solo-recorded releases, Transilvania Smile from 1994, was recently unearthed and re-released. Full of lo-fi intimacy and sauntering, baroque melody, listening to it feels like time-travelling to a bygone age that lived at a different pace to modern times. From the same period, a release with Oleksandr Yurchenko titled Znayesh Yak? Rozkazhy (1996) brims with the carnivalesque, operatic playfulness and solemn hymns that characterise Nianio’s work. Contemporarily, Nianio’s output – including recent release Eye of the Sea (2023) with multi-instrumentalist, composer and improviser Tom James Scott – remains a poetic, sparkling, musical concatenation of quiet, experimental chamber pop sounds. Nianio’s songs – holding as much a sense of mystery as she does herself – inevitably invoke a wonderful feeling of discovery and intrigue.

*Svitlana Nianio's performance on Saturday 6 April at Lutherse Kerk is seated