Alexey Shmurak, Oleh Shpudeiko

*2025 stock* The first record of an emblematic Kyiv duo, Alexey Shmurak and Oleh Shpudeiko (recording solo as Heinali), Liebestod is a surreal journey through a kaleidoscope of song and dance tropes, poetic worlds, and languages—a meta-verse of a work. Written throughout 2021-2022, it refers to Richard Wagner's love-death in its title: an ambivalent mood between ecstatic delight and anticipation of death. The heroine of Tristan and Isolde lives through hours of unsettling discord before breaking into a final, rapturous union with her dead beloved and lifelessly sinking on Tristan’s body in a “vast wave of the world’s breath.”

In Shmurak and Shpudeiko’s interpretation, love-death represents music that speaks to the end of a small person’s intimate story while heralding an encounter with a macro-narrative—history. The fragility of relationships and lives, the anxiety about the safety of loved ones, the separation, the nostalgia, the yearning for tranquility, the looming terror of what’s to come, and the acceptance of its enormity—these are the themes of this album.

Texts by Ivan Mazepa, Volodymyr Svidzinsky, Inger Christensen, and John Keats are woven into a conversation between a vulnerable, self-deprecating voice and electronics that gradually exert increasing pressure on the voice before inundating the entire space.