Recycled-plastic flutes and an album about mythical creatures: what ONUKA is doing in Chernihiv
In a 1904 family house left by her grandparents, Nata Zhyzhchenko has built a singing workshop, a filming space and an instrument laboratory. A new ONUKA album is promised for the autumn.
The band ONUKA is preparing a new album, while its frontwoman Nata Zhyzhchenko has spent recent years building a space in Chernihiv that has become a cultural institution of the city in its own right — Fabrychna 12.
She described it in an interview with UP.Kultura.
The space occupies a 1904 house that belonged to her grandparents, Oleksandr and Valentyna Shlonchyk. Nata's children are the fifth generation on that land.
A city that became a foothold
Chernihiv is not a backdrop in this story. Zhyzhchenko describes it as a place people return to not out of nostalgia but because there is something there worth holding on to; the house survived the siege of the city, and blast waves knocked out its windows.
"Chernihiv for me is a place of support," says Nata Zhyzhchenko.
The Tarnovsky historical museum made an exhibition about her and her grandfather: her Eurovision costumes and synthesizers stand there next to the instruments he built. And at Peremoha Lab they print bright sopilkas from sorted plastic, at a cost that communities can actually afford.
The album and the question of the machine
The new ONUKA album is promised for the autumn, and Zhyzhchenko describes it with an image easier to hear than to retell: mythical creatures pick up Ukrainian folk instruments and stage a set in a forest. In parallel she talks about what is already changing the whole industry.
"For a very long time I was an opponent of artificial intelligence. And honestly, even now, if you ask me who wins the battle between artificial intelligence and a human, it seems to me that artificial intelligence has already won," she admits.
Even so, Zhyzhchenko is convinced that live performance will only become more valuable — just as time without a phone becomes valuable. The logic is simple: the more generated material there is around, the dearer the things made by hand.
As ONE//FM wrote earlier, Ukrainian electronic music needed thirty-five years to reach the big stages — and that road did not begin in the capital.
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