Andriana-Yaroslava Saienko - Atlantis

A Closer Listen

Reviewing film scores is an easier task as one has generally access to the film, but with a play one needs to rely on program notes and stage photos to understand the context. Even if the music stands on its own, it is essential to dig deeper when scant liner notes only mention a fantasy about returning home and the album opens with an eerie drone punctuated by explosions in the distance.

Atlantis is the second soundtrack from Andriana-Yaroslava Saienko for a play directed by Max Nowotarski and staged in Brno, Czech Republic. The explosions are part of field recordings taken by Ihor Babaiev in Bakhmut, Donetsk Oblast, not long before the destruction of the city by Russian forces.

A one-minute version of these recordings, complete with crickets singing and the whimpering of frightened animals, were highly commended at the BBC sound of the year awards 2022. The full 15-minute version, Voices of Bakhmut, exists as an audiovisual project, the story of an attempt to restore intimacy amidst the distance imposed by war that unfolds through the voice messages of a foreign correspondent stationed in a front-line city. Here, these field recordings are distilled and recontextualized acquiring new meaning as sonic remains from the vanishing point of memory.

So, what is Atlantis about? I asked Andriana-Yaroslava Saienko and Max Nowotarski.

“Atlantis is a story about returning home — to an artist’s hometown, now occupied by the enemy and nearly destroyed by war. The protagonist, a writer who has spent years abroad, comes back to recover lost memories, words, images, and revelations once recorded in his diary during peacetime. Without these memories, he feels unable to create.

Upon returning, he reunites with his family — his mother, who sees in him the image of her husband who died in the war; his sister, who struggles to keep life going in their home; and his brother, who serves in the military, defending the city.

The play is about the fading image of the past, about time slipping away, taking with it a world once familiar and beloved. It explores the inner conflict between being an artist and a citizen, the weight of choice, love as a force that calls one home, and death as a form of release.” [Andriana-Yaroslava Saienko]

In “Your homes, our maps,” Uilliem Blacker questions whether memory can still exist when everything is being done to erase its physical and cultural traces and asks if there is a way to look back at a city that is being lost and its population cleansed. Blacker previously examined the cases of Warsaw, Kyiv and Lviv, amongst other cities remarkably resistant to wholesale refashioning in his book Memory, the City and the Legacy of World War II in East Central Europe The Ghosts of Others. Their surfaces of those cities resisted erasure and whitewashing. But what if the little that has been left is rubble and all that remains has fallen under occupation as is the case of Bakhmut?

It is likely that in this case, the city will undergo a radical attempt to replace one constitutive narrative of socio-territorial identity with a new alien one. This is what Stefan Berger, quoted by Backer, indicated happened to Konigsberg now Kaliningrad. The Red Army created a clean slate in the cityscape as the very buildings themselves, and even the street layout, were felt to be inimical to Soviet Ideology.

And yet, cities defy amnesia when they are inscribed in one’s own biographical data and human relations. “Bakhmut is not buildings or bricks, Bakhmut is people. Even though the town ceased to exist in physical form, it lives on in the community, in our paper,” says Svitlana Ovcharenko editor of the Vpered newspaper [The Guardian, 7 December, 2024].

In Vera Logdanidi’s Voices, a collection of testimonies and audio messages from friends in the immediate aftermath of the full-scale invasion, the Bakhmut born deejay Udda dreams about actual locations from her childhood, and more specifically, the yard of the building where she lived until she turned 15. Udda’s story demonstrates the way topographical memory is etched in our minds even when a city becomes a byword for annihilation.

The role of emotional landmarks and the way our mnemonic umbilical cord connects us to our roots emerges from “Return” the opening track of Atlantis. The air raid siren, which the initial drone seems to suggest, reveals itself to be an organ overlayed with plaintive voices in the polyphonic tradition (it’s probably not a coincidence that Andriana-Yaroslava Saienko has been working with Heinali on a project about Hildegard von Bingen). However, the promise of the recovery of a lost home and identity is undermined by the threat of explosions.

Atlantis – Studio Marta

“It’s a very personal story for me. I’m even present in it along with fictional characters,” – Max Nowotarski tells me. “I left Ukraine just before the invasion. I did not see the war with my own eyes, but it became part of my imagination, and I live it there every day. But this is a story about going back. And to make this play, I needed to make this journey at least in my mind.

I realized that the world I knew had changed, and I had to learn it anew. That’s why I wanted these to be real sounds, so that I could get to know this reality myself. The story does not mention any real city, but for me it is Bakhmut. And I knew that my friend Ihor went to record this city shortly before the occupation. In fact, not much remains of the city, and Ihor’s recordings are one of those things. Since one of the main themes of Atlantis is memory, I realized that I had to talk to Ihor about the materials.”

To create this backdrop of a ruptured past and constant tension, Saienko had to distil Babaiev’s field recordings.

I remember when I first received the recordings — I spent the whole day with my headphones on, listening to this “silence” of Bakhmut, punctuated by explosions. Choosing which real-life war explosions sounded “better” — isn’t that already a dystopian reality?

And yet, for some Czechs, those explosions sounded ambiguous, even resembling the distant rumble of thunder. It was fascinating to observe how an untraumatized mind interprets danger signals in an unconscious effort to protect itself…

With “Praying” the tone becomes liturgical leaving hope and regrets simmering under the surface. Lost intimacy is refracted through the broken murmur of “Brat” (Ukrainian for Brother) which attempts to recover the familial language. Acoustic hypervigilance is triggered in “Otec?” (Ukrainian for Father) where sonic shadows of the past emerge in the reflection of soundwaves from a life that can never be recovered in full. The pervading feeling is one of absence. Only when the loss is acknowledged can one begin to believe that not everything is lost. When a place is gone it is everywhere. And so it is with Bakhmut.

The album comes to a close with “Sonce” (Ukrainian for Sun) a track that combines two Ukrainian folk wedding songs. The tone, however, is not jubilant, more of a restrained affirmation of identity in a world that is collapsing all around.

(Atlantis) is a return to a past that has been betrayed to some extent, to a lost past, a forgotten world, Atlantis. But this past can be found if you overcome the fear of death. Therefore, it is also a spiritual journey to something that is essential for every person in this life. In this case, this story can be interpreted in different ways: for Ukrainians, it is a story about the present, for Europeans (the premiere was in the Czech Republic), it is a story about a potential future. [Max Nowotarski]

So is the vision of the future presented by Atlantis a dystopic one?

In a way, yes. Though we live in a time when dystopian fiction easily manifests into reality. So, it’s really up to the audience — whether they see it as a dystopian fantasy or simply an honest look into the near future. [Andriana-Yaroslava Saienko] (Gianmarco Del Re)