olechko

Yesterday I got a chance to check ut the Free Range graduate show at the Old Truman Brewery, especially the City of Wesmister college photography show at 93 Feet East.

Last night our roommate Nabil performed with his friends fabulously at Betsey Trotwood

in Clerkenwell.  Listening to their one night band was a great pleasure.

Love the customized murals by the Two Little Hands I discovered though Ohdeedoh.

Ralph Fleck exhibiting now at  Purdy Hicks interesting paintings of orderly aranged people, books, trees - looking forward to seeing the show.

Cryhitka Zahes, oil on board, 18×24 cm, 2008. Please send your bid by email if you want to purchase this painting.

Recently I saw a show by an indie band from Kyiv called Kryhitka Zahes (Cleine Zahes) at the Lyal’ka club in Lviv. There is girl with long bags who sings, two guitar players and a drummer who puts on particularly electrifying act. The band (singer in particular) has a European indie(pendent) artsy feel about it, in the way they dress and act on stage, like too many bands in the West do, and too few - here. They performed some old things you’d recognize from hearing them on a radio, and some new, a song about a car was very good. They’ve got a new bass player - as their original bassist has recently passed away.

The band’s got an environmental message they promote. A girl sitting next to me won a canvas grocery bag for answering some band-related trivia right. (btw, Ukrainians widely recycle their plastic bags too).

Check out their My Space profile for samples of their music and list of upcoming shows.

24.01.08 worked off the original doodle to paint this scene now in oil.

We just got a word from Andriy (in sunshades on the pic) that our favoarite Ukrainian band has won the 2007 Battle of the Bands qualifiers in Ukraine to go to London for the final show on Dec. 4-6. We are very happy for the guys and expect this to turn into a sweet record deal!

Last night I really enjoyed a perfomance by Dakha Brakha - an ento chaos band that usually accompanies perfomances at Dakh - the Centre for Contemporary Art. The guys got great reviews in the British media for their Barbican premiere of Macbeth last year.

One can really get into it only by experiencing their music first-hand - get the energy from the lovely folk tunes and energetic beat. Check out the pictures from the show here (first few shots in the set).

Highly reccomend checking out the Dakh shows (the bill is updated regularly on their site in English) . Mind half of their shows are text free, so you don’t have to understand Ukrainian or Russian to go there.

Kiev, Bolshaya Vasilkovskaya str., 136 (Libidskaya metro)

The other night we took out our guest to a soccer game at the Olympic stadium where Italy played Ukraine in 2008 world cup qualifier. The Italians won 2 to 1 (scored by Schevchenko). The funnest part about the game was the crowd’s chanting, singing and funny drops in energy after intence moments of cheer. The downsides - a cloud of sigarette smoke that rose over the stadium and gave me the hangover feeling the next day. Another fun opportunity to check out this scene will be in a couple of months when the French team comes to play in Kyiv.

The place whre we could not come into for the longest time becuase of the cloud of smoke that greeted us at the every attempt to enter. Today the crowd was gone (live music gigs are going to resume only in September). The decor is a soviet basement with pre-revolutoin furniture piled on top of each otehr and cave style paintings on the walls. The greatest find were the well stocked Ukrainian bookstore at the very back and the Gogol bordello poster with an autograpth by the bar.     It definitely attracts the bohemian type; I heard they serve the superb Lvivska Persha Brewery beer!

Pushkinska 2

spotted this coolest video on YouTube on Neeka’s backlog - of our favoarite Gogol Bordello and Madonna perfoming together at the Live Earth concert in London the other day.  Can’t figure out how to embed the video here right away…

..was amazingly good, particularly during those parts of it when it did not rain. We picked up a few nice crafty things, along with Yuschenko who created great commotion in between the craft stalls. He also shopped for stuff to add to his already huge collection of folksy things. The event attracted lots of cool-looking young people, (and like on the picture below, taken by Little Miss Moi) everybody and their baby were wearing vyshyvanka (embroidered shirt).

The whole celebration was associated with Ivana Kupala - traditional pagan by origin celebration of youth and mating.

The last pic in the row shows mesmerized public at the performance by currently our favorite Ukrainian band AtmAsfera. We bumped into these guys in Lviv playing on the street by the Opera one Sunday night. We were swept away by their music (David put 100 hryvna into their cello case during the first five minutes of listening). It turned out they were practicing on the streets that way not to get rusty, and were on their way to a show in Poland - just like Jeff Buckley, we thought, wow.

Here I came up with a sketch of people getting drenched under the rain and the stern look of Rodina Mat’.

An international music festival took place last weekend at Olimpiyski stadium in central Kyiv. It runs for two days and been around for like sixteen years. All the popstarts obliged, mostly Russian and Ukrainian (Romanian, even one French dude, I recon). Performers like Okean Elzy and Ruslana had other engagements I suppose, VV appeared at the end and Verka Serduchka almost closed the festival. The festival was tooted to be the biggest music event of the year. And it was celebrated accordingly. It was great to finally put the voices to faces, you know, that music that always glares in the taxis on radio Shanson. It really got the crowd going, dances, etc, impressive, considering the beer at the stalls run out at 7:30 pm and closing fireworks shoot up past 10 pm.

Lviv is one of my top three favorite cities to live in, although it’s more like visit because all the lvivites I meet cautiously talk of short supply of water and other inconveniences. Given I never stayed there longer then a week, these things we are yet to explore.

The usual architectural landmarks to see there are the Lutheran cathedral and the Campians’ chapel, the Armenian church and the streets nearby, the Rynok square, the arts market and the Opera. Since we arrived mid-week, opera was closed and we ended up dozing off in the cool of Zaknovetska theater with school kids on matinée.

The old and tried Dzyga gallery had the Yellow-themed exhibit of many local artists.The cool yard nearby the roman-catholic church got gated off, preserving the stunning graffiti from getting “corrected”. A new great find is Slyvka gallery around the corner from the art market, full of original trinkets at realistic prices. This girl particularly looked interesting. Another fun new gallery is on Virmenska St. called The Green Sofa exhibited paintings from plain-air at the Mediterranean.