ILYICH is a musician and storyteller reincarnated in Kherson, Ukraine.

Augmenting music performances with performance art ILYICH plays live and pilots full sound of electronic music through soul and jazz. Embedded into a fusion of six-string bass and djing, playing with synthesisers, drum machines, string orchestras, and choirs ILYICH tells stories. The stories, situated in South Ukraine are inspired by struggle and resolution and shared as past life recollections from various first person perspectives 

ILYICH is known for their live music releases with Nervous Records and Lot Radio in New York, Gilles Peterson and the BBC 6 Music radio rotation, unearthly performances at Roskilde and Fusion festivals and discursive occurrences in galleries, museums and cultural spaces such as the Serpentine Galleries in London; Sonic Acts in Amsterdam, SAVVY Contemporary, Centre for Contemporary Arts and House of World Cultures in Berlin, and steirischer herbst in Graz, among others, and is featured as one of Spotify’s best fresh experimental finds. Driven by the vision to construct conditions for a unitive experience ILYICH develops an entirely different set of cosmological coordinates through music, sound, visual art and theatre. Interwoven with myth and the act of storytelling their cosmic landscapes meet the audience halfway and invite to unlearn predetermined relational models.

ILYICH first appears as a semi-fictional character during the contemporary art exhibition documenta14, in Athens in 2017. Their elusive origin and fluid identity, their sound, music, stories and poems encourage imaginative exploration and challenge contemporary forms of marginalisation processes on Earth. ILYICH is the initiator of the Grounded Outer Space People, a nomadic artist residency/music ensemble tracing the relationship between transmigration and music and the host of the Concrete Listening Show at the Refuge Worldwide Radio tracing ways of listening through words, jazz and electronic music.

The name ILYICH was initially lost during the early 2000s after leaving Ukraine as a refugee. As a semi-fictional persona, it now serves as a starting point for their artistic practice in the form of musical concerts and interactive sound sculptures. Creating sonic and visual spaces ILYICH invites to disrupt identitarian, fascistic, and hyper-individualised constructions of the self that separate us.

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TRANSMISSION CHANNELS:

Performances, live modular and DJ sets, radio shows, sonic meditations and listening sessions -> book@ilyich.net

Press -> press@ilyich.net

General enquiries -> now@ilyich.net