“Extracting sounds and ideas from their idealized origins and forcing them into modern, contradictory contexts.”
Oleh Shpudeiko, kown as Heinali, is a composer and sound artist whose work channels early Western music through electronic composition and modular synthesis, using the past as a “distant mirror” to expose contradictions in contemporary life.
Born in Kyiv, Heinali gained international recognition with Madrigals (2020), which blends period-instrument improvisations with quasi-Renaissance polyphony generated on modular synthesizer. His 2023 album Kyiv Eternal, described by The New York Times as “a ravishing audioscape,” is a hauntological portrait of his home city under attack, layering prewar field recordings with ambient memory loops from his own archives. His 2025 release Гільдеґарда (Hildegard), praised by Pitchfork as “a chilling meditation on wartime trauma and the endurance of faith,” reimagines Hildegard von Bingen’s music through the embodied experience of war, combining Ukrainian traditional vocals by Andriana-Yaroslava Saienko with modular synthesis inspired by medieval polyphony.
