ILYICH

ILYICH is a musician and storyteller reincarnated in Kherson, Ukraine.

Augmenting music performances with performance art ILYICH plays live and pilots the full sound of electronic music through soul and jazz.

In high resonance with dancers and nerds alike, ILYICH is known for their live music releases with Nervous Records and The Lot Radio in New York; Gilles Peterson and BBC 6 Music Radio Rotation; unearthly performances at the Roskilde and Fusion Festivals; and discursive occurrences at galleries, museums, and cultural spaces, including the Serpentine Galleries in London; Sonic Acts in Amsterdam; SAVVY Contemporary; the Centre for Contemporary Arts; and the House of World Cultures in Berlin, among others.

ILYICH is the initiator of the Grounded Outer Space People, a nomadic artist residency/music ensemble tracing the relationship between transmigration and music, and the host of Listening Hymns on Refuge Worldwide, tracing ways of listening through spoken word, jazz, and electronic music.

The name ILYICH was initially lost during the early 2000s after leaving Ukraine as a refugee. As a semi-fictional persona, it now serves as a starting point for their artistic practice in the form of musical concerts and interactive sound sculptures. Creating sonic and visual spaces ILYICH invites us to disrupt identitarian, fascistic, and hyper-individualised constructions of the self that separate us.

www.ilyich.net / @ilyich.now