Ukrainian Field Notes: Sound, Music And Voices From Ukraine After The Full-Scale Invasionis an unusually intimate study of war told through the ear rather than the camera. Drawing on over 300 interviews with musicians, listeners, organisers and cultural workers, writer and documentarian Gianmarco Del Re asks what happens when an entire aural environment is rewritten by artillery, air‑raid sirens and the low‑level hum of anxiety. Instead of treating explosions and alarms as mere background, he explores how these sounds are registered, processed and sometimes resisted, and how they infiltrate or are deliberately excluded from contemporary electronic and experimental music.

The book follows the remarkable adaptations that Ukrainian music‑making has undergone since the full‑scale invasion. Composers work on mobile phones when studios are inaccessible; DJs and bands stream from basements and bomb shelters; festivals are reimagined to fit curfew windows and security constraints. Clubs become logistical hubs for volunteering and fundraising before slowly reopening as cultural spaces with new responsibilities. At the same time, Del Re tracks the role of the diaspora: artists forced abroad who sever old working patterns while building new networks of collaboration across Europe and beyond. Their experiences complicate simple narratives of exile, showing how identity can be remade through sound even as it remains tethered to a damaged home.

Structured as a “360‑degree” oral history, Ukrainian Field Notes listens closely to the ways musicians describe their changing relationship to noise, silence, memory and place. It asks how wartime conditions alter ideas of national, collective and postcolonial identity, and how electronic music vocabularies are stretched to accommodate sirens, drones and their psychological afterimages. By foregrounding voices usually relegated to footnotes in geopolitical reporting, Del Re offers a nuanced portrait of a scene under pressure that continues to create, organise and imagine futures in sound even as the present roars in its ears.