Introducing Mustache Funk: The underground sounds that flourished in Soviet-controlled Ukraine

In April 2022, I wrote for the Big Issue about Ukraine’s “song of resistance” Chervona Ruta – a groovy orchestral folk-pop number from 1968 which, in defiance of Soviet authorities, smuggled forbidden patriotic sentiment into ostensibly sweetly innocent lyrics. Written by 19-year-old Volodymyr Ivasyuk – who became one of the most famous musicians in Ukrainian history before dying in 1979, probably vengefully murdered by the KGB – it has taken on renewed resonance in the wake of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine. 

It left me intrigued about how music acts as a beacon of cultural sovereignty in Ukraine, blinking in the fog of “Russification” long imposed upon the country by its much bigger neighbour. I was excited, then, to learn about the release of Even the Forest Hums: Ukrainian Sonic Archives 1971-1996. A compilation album by American label Light in the Attic, curated in collaboration with Kyiv-based Shukai Records, it uncovers a 20th-century Ukrainian music scene that flourished in spite of the risks.

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The album’s tracklisting surveys essentially two separate explosions. The first was in the 1970s, the so called “golden age” of Ukrainian music, when artists determined enough to navigate the bureaucratic hell of the Soviet state permit system and record at a handful of state-run studios found cunning ways to avoid falling foul of censors by writing western-inspired psychedelic pop songs about Komsomol members and tireless workers, or reworking trad folk numbers in rocked-up styles, with subtly nationalistic motifs. 

In a documentary he made about the scene a few years ago, Vitalii ‘Bard’ Bardetskyi – a renowned Kyiv based writer and filmmaker – dubbed the movement ‘Mustache Funk’. In tribute to the impressive furry chevrons sported on the top lips of male musicians (see Kobza’s amazing mousers, above), and a funkiness of sound arrived at not merely through African-American influence (accessible via western radio stations), but also the danceable syncopated rhythms of traditional highland tunes of the Carpathians. Behold, the wah-wah guitar frenzy of Shapoval Sextet’s Oh, Get Ready, Cossack, There Will Be a March. 

The entire movement was anti-Soviet, writes Bardetskyi, in the album’s liner notes. It ended in an oppressive crackdown, of which Ivasyuk’s murder can be considered a part.

From there, Even the Forest Hums moves forward to the mid 1980s to mid 1990s – the period of perestroika, Chernobyl, collapse of the USSR and beyond. By which point Ukrainians were taking advantage of loosening state control to devour newfound influences from far and wide – punk, synth pop, goth, indie rock, acid house, ambient and industrial – and utilising relatively inexpensive electronic home recording equipment to create wild fusions of sound celebrating newfound artistic freedom and reengagement with the wider world. 

The baggy swagger of The Hostilnia’s Sick Song is straight out of Madchester. Uksusnik, whose track North Wind is like a downtempo Cossack march played by Gang of Four, was the first band of Gogol Bordello’s Eugene Hütz, before he moved to America and became a star, working with Madonna. 

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Dmytro Prutkin, a co-founder of Shukai Records, speaks to me via video call from Kyiv about the joys and tribulations of the “archaeological” process, as he calls it, of unearthing lost sounds of Ukraine’s past. “Lost”, much of it, because in the post-Soviet era, Ukrainians wanted to look forwards, not back. 

“When western music came to market,” Prutkin explains, “all this Soviet music, it was like ‘It’s not interesting. Let’s forget about it. It doesn’t sound like Pink Floyd. It doesn’t sound like Prince. It sounds very common, simple, primitive.’” It’s taken a new, younger generation to start rifling through vinyl and cassettes at fleamarkets and thrift stores and begin rediscovering Soviet- era sounds with fresh ears. 

When it came to asking musicians’ permission to use their songs, many were nonplussed, even dismissive. But others engaged enthusiastically. Kyrylo Stetsenko was a composer and producer who, in the 1980s, worked with folk-pop star Tetiana Kocherhina, to try and give her a new, more modern electronic sound. After Prutkin dug up their discotastic number Play, the Violin, Play, it became his “dream” to re-release it. When he reached out to Stetsenko, he was also offered something never heard before from the vault. Oh, How, How? – a sad lament sung by Kocherhina, set to a pumping proto-house breakbeat.

“We were like, ‘Yeah, let’s put it on!’” Prutkin grins. “It’s a banger.” Which is not a word you hear applied often to a song featuring a bandura. 

Plans for the compilation stretch back years. The original one had to cover Soviet-era pop music from across the USSR’s vast borders – Ukraine, the Baltic states, Kazakhstan, even Russia. But the Russian invasion of February 2022 changed everything, and it eventually became a staunchly Ukrainian thing, with an emotive cover featuring iconic folk paintings by artist Maria Prymachenko. Even songs by Ukrainians sung in Russian were deemed too controversial and dropped. 

As such, Even the Forest Hums becomes its own little defiant declaration of cultural sovereignty. But Prutkin stresses that Shukai were doing what they do before the full-scale Russian invasion began, and would be doing it still no matter what, for the love of the music first and foremost. The war has just given it all a heavier new meaning, both globally and at home. “It’s a sad situation,” Prutkin sighs, “but a good opportunity for citizens, for Ukrainians, to understand their own culture more.”

Even the Forest Hums: Ukrainian Sonic Archives 1971-1996 is released on 18 October; part of the proceeds go to Livyj Bereh, a volunteer group working to rebuild war-affected regions of Ukraine

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