Ian Spektor
Cherven

Cherven is a forty-minute documentary audio piece, recorded in 2022–23 in Kyiv, Chernihiv, and Volodarka, Ukraine. Kyiv-based sound artist Ian Spektor dedicated the work to four friends: Hena Kolesnyk, Kostya Kuzin, Bohdan Mazurenko, and Anton Petrochko, who were killed in the summer of 2023 near Bakhmut, Orikhiv, and Kupiansk. As a diary of loss, the work accompanies a city not on the front but still never free from it.

The work does not attempt to sugarcoat what is documented. Children’s voices can be heard because they are part of Spektor’s life; funeral processions can be heard because they are part of everyday life in Kyiv. At the center of the narrative are four men who—with one exception—are never directly heard. Cherven conveys a rich atmosphere: streets, playgrounds, apartments, concert halls, churches, and hospitals. Yet it is not an ambient piece. Fifty-three audio tracks overlap. A narrative emerges from these layers so that the work ultimately functions like a documentary radio play.