Musician Alex Yatsun’s house was shelled by Russian forces, but he has focused the trauma and apocalyptic feeling into atmospheric tracks that help him get ‘out of reality’
When the Russian invasion of Ukraine began in 2022, Alex Yatsun was living just 30km from the Russian border in the northernmost part of Kharkiv. “When I woke up that day I started living in a completely different reality,” he recalls. “There were bombs falling every hour.”-
Yatsun’s family evacuated but he soon returned north to more dangerous territory to volunteer at a medical centre. “But my house was hit by shelling,” he recalls. A photograph on his Instagram shows the aftermath: huge chunks of wall blown out, smashed windows, a mangled front door. “That was the moment I decided to move closer to central Ukraine.”
