A great-grandmother’s carol, a line from Skovoroda and a voice from Polissia: a song from Lutsk is now in S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2

The song Там на Йордані (There on the Jordan) by Lutsk singer Daryna Panas has made it into the story expansion S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2: Cost of Hope. The track came out last year, and it ended up in the game with no involvement from the artist herself.

Daryna Panas announced it herself in her own post on 27 August.

The developers approached not her but her distributor, the label kontrabass. The studio was offered a catalogue of Ukrainian artists, picked its performers from it, and Panas only found out after the fact.

Three layers in one song

The artist describes the idea as a triptych: philosophy, a carol and living family memory in a single recording. She heard the carol from her great-grandmother and recorded it while the older woman could still sing it.

Panas has spent years collecting the song heritage of Volyn Polissia and the accounts of its oldest residents. Her explanation is a simple one: folklore is kept inside people, and if it is not recorded it disappears along with them.

“I have always collected this, because it is memory, and these are important artefacts too. Song folklore is preserved in the people who carry it. If someone dies and you have not recorded the song they knew, it will not survive,” Daryna Panas told Suspilne.

The artist names the idea behind the song in Skovoroda’s own words — sridna pratsia, work that follows a person’s own calling and leaves them feeling they are exactly where they belong.

The release credits three authors of the words: Panas herself, Hryhorii Skovoroda and her great-grandmother Tetiana Snopyk. Volyn Field handled the music production, while the recording and the cover art came from two more people out of the same circle.

What it means to her

The artist put her reaction to the news briefly and without any grandstanding: for her, this is the way a country speaks about itself to the outside world.

“I think this is Ukrainian cultural diplomacy, I can’t put it any other way. I haven’t played the game, but I know that my great-grandmother, me, Skovoroda, Volyn and the Ukrainian language now sound in it,” Daryna Panas wrote.

She was not the only one taken into the game: in her stories she shared a playlist of other artists from the same label who also made it into the expansion. So this was a whole pool of Ukrainian names rather than an isolated case.

Panas has a degree in cultural studies, works in communications and sings. Her discography still holds only a handful of releases, and Там на Йордані is the one she calls a document of her own roots.

Earlier we looked at how Ukrainian electronic music travelled from squats to Coachella in thirty-five years — another route by which the same music reaches the outside world.