Hello. My name is Liza. For the last few months, I have been in Kyiv again. I spent the first year of the full-scale invasion in Lviv. I actually come from Odesa, and before the initial move to Kyiv, I lived in Warsaw for four years. I write and play music at parties, although sometimes these activities do not intersect. Because in my music, at the moment, I like to explore something that could conventionally be called "deconstructed/art pop", but, in DJ sets, I prefer new (and not really) findings of tracks that I think would be nice to dance to. But even though my music is filled and inspired by dance and post-dance genres, at the moment, I don't like working with the conventions of the DJ tools and the genre of so-called "experimental" electronic music. But it depends on the mood and is constantly changing.

How did your interest in music start? How did it develop, and what and who influenced you?

My interest in music began in my early childhood, and my first powerful musical experience, if it's not false memory, coincides with the first thoughts about infinity and mortality. It's somewhere in the summer of ’96. I'm five years old and at the peak of Mortal Kombat mania, listening to a tape with tracks from the first full-length film of the franchise. Then suddenly, during some second or third listening of the compilation, instead of constantly rewinding the record to the main theme, something clicks in me at the moment of the chorus in Gravity Kills "Goodbye (Demo)". And I am overcome by an inexplicable desire to be able to listen to this track and get emotional feelings from interacting with it ‘till infinity. Emotion after emotion, thought after thought, and this perceptual insatiability leads me to the understanding that this is not really possible because (as far as I know) people are mortal and, at some point, I will not be here too with all these thoughts, emotions and panics from encounters of the psyche with understanding oneself as a finite being.

One way or another, the beginning of this never-ending story of insatiability for the experiences of new textures, sounds, and forms is drawn in my memory precisely by this reminiscence. Then there were tapes with IDM and Britpop, recorded and brought by a cousin from Scotland, an inherited love for Frank Zappa and Prince from my father, and the Internet with Soulseek, which led to the first experiments with creating my music. At first, it was in the form of a black metal, drone, one-man-band, until at the age of fifteen, I discovered psytrance, and hard techno, schranz and started recording my first dance tracks in Cubase, Reason, Fruity Loops because DAWs often changed along with genres and switched depending on them. Although Ableton has been my main editor for a long time, I still believe that, for example, there is no better software tool than Reason's Dr. Octo Rex for working with amen breaks.

At different times, from 2007 to 2012, I played and produced blog house, electroclash, new disco, classic house, electro, etc. I think many millennials are familiar with this progression. Then, for a long time, I worked with post-industrial music in the broadest sense of the term, including power electronics, drone, and noise, as well as minimal wave and some forms of bass and techno.

It all led to an interest in concrete music, electroacoustics, and contemporary academic music. It was not until 2016, influenced by post-Cage aesthetics, EAI, Onkyokei, and a group of "the composers of quiet" (as noted music critic Alex Ross described them in a column for The New Yorker), Wandelweiser, when I noticed that all my compositions begin to be reduced to a conceptual game with forms and negative space. And they get rid of musicality itself, the sound organised not by an epistemic toolkit on the body of aesthetics but by an aesthetic toolkit as it is.

Being more interested in concepts than sounds, I stopped playing music for the first time in my conscious life and started studying a discipline more relevant to my interests, philosophy, because, as, for example, Gilles Deleuze defines the activity of philosophy, it is a tool for creating, developing and inventing concepts. But the desire to create music and DJing did not go anywhere, no matter how much I repressed it. And a few months before the full-scale war, I decided to stop blocking it and let all kinds of manifestations of my subjectivity flow as smoothly as possible. Of course, history had its plans, but as a result, in a world where atrocities in Bucha are possible and a terrorist state unimpededly accepts the next presidency of the UN Security Council, it turned out to be easier and more honest to shout into the irrational abyss of musical abstractions than to think with all the Olympian rationality about the conceptual content of perceptual experience under the sounds of sirens.

Please tell us more about your philosophical practice. What are you researching, what are you studying? What is music to you, as a philosopher, — what is its meaning and significance?

I specialise in the legacy of Wilfrid Sellars, his influence both, on American analytic philosophy and pragmatism and recent Sellars’s reading by the continental camp. My main interests include philosophy of language, social (and individual) epistemology, metaphilosophy, and philosophy of sexuality and gender.

Of all the artistic mediums, music is the most difficult for philosophical analysis. There is no semantic content in music. It does not exist as an object, except in the medium, and does not actually describe or represent anything, no matter how the composers might not agree with it. Nevertheless, music evokes certain emotions and affections in listeners, and being listeners themselves, composers try to do the same with their works. Sometimes they succeed and they still manage to convey similar emotions, but it is mostly dictated by the over-musical context: from the controlled title of the work and the cover of the single/album to the listening situation, time, mood, and cultural awareness of the listener. And in addition to the emotional experience, there is also the question of the value of a certain work, connected to the contextual background of the existence of this work: time, norms, customs of a certain scene, used clichés, the listener's awareness of this. This is a very complex and elusive conceptual interaction, and in terms of the question of the pure meaning and significance of music as such, we need to allow ourselves to be more, wherever it may be, generously relativistic, focusing rather on the social and communal aspects of music: the shared experiences of making and listening to it, the gathering around it, the transformative political power of forming communities, and the power that music brings exactly to you.

Which Ukrainian musical communities are you interested in? Which artists are close to you?

Overall, I like what ∄ and Standard Deviation are doing, and my favourite contemporary Ukrainian artists, Katarina Gryvul and Diana Azzuz, are published right there. They both write incredibly multi-layered music with lots of interesting timbres, glitches, and compositional solutions. I’m also inspired by the density and detailing of John Object’s sound and the aggressive energy of Re:drum. Among the communities/agencies, I would also like to single out UKHO with their titanic work in the promotion and popularisation of contemporary academic music in Ukraine and also ШЩЦ.

How did the war affect your worldview? Has it changed your musical preferences?

It has become very difficult to remain optimistic about the future of humanity. I don't like Western-centric formulations like "an invasive war in Europe in the 21st century, how is this possible?". But when it happened, unfortunately, this thought came to my mind as well, even though Palestine with Korea, Nigeria, Afghanistan, Iraq, and Syria, to name a (very) few, was enough to take off the rose-coloured glasses of belief in planetarity and a shared path to common goals and challenges with all the beautiful ideas such as the "Manifesto for an Accelerationist Politics", post-scarcity economy and Prometheanism. In no way I'm not trying to deny the theoretical expediency and importance of such projects, but the historical situation does not leave the opportunity and energy to follow and think about such things. Speaking of musical preferences, it's hard to say because they are always randomising in me anyway, but the beginning of a full-scale invasion coincided with my interest in Postcolonialism and the exploration of contemporary dance genres and cultures of Latin America and Africa. Of course, this can be partly explained by the general trade for some kind of global base. But taking the fact that after February 24, for example, Western classical music for me was covered with some literal stench of imperialism, and I cannot afford to enjoy my once beloved Mahler, I think that yes, the war definitely affected my musical perception.

How do you cope with stress? What brings you joy and hope? What inspires you?

What always helps me to cope with stress is everyday work, spending time with my partner, meetings with friends, delicious food, and new acquaintances – that illusion of common life that, thanks to our Armed Forces, I can afford to keep. I’m inspired by various daydreams and abstract ineffable pictures in my mind, fanciful visions of my future self and the warm memories of my past self, as well as the visual worlds of artists, directors, and writers who are new to me.