The community radio station broadcasting from war-torn Kyiv

Spaces Between the Beats is a series spot­light­ing music and cul­tur­al com­mu­ni­ties around the world, explor­ing their sto­ries as they build resilience and find mean­ing and hope in connection.

“Before I start­ed the project, I thought for a long time about what I want­ed to give to Ukrain­ian cul­ture,” Olek­sii Makarenko tells me as he leans for­ward over Zoom, the Kyiv sky­line vis­i­ble through a win­dow behind him. ​“And the answer came unex­pect­ed­ly: fuel.”

Makarenko, who was pre­vi­ous­ly the edi­tor-in-chief of the cul­ture mag­a­zine, Katakult, is rec­ol­lect­ing the idea he and his friend/​fellow cul­tur­al gate­keep­er Valentin Bobylev came up with dur­ing the sum­mer of 2021. Fuel, he explains, became the metaphor for what would become their online com­mu­ni­ty sta­tion, Gaso­line Radio.

Broad­cast­ing through­out the war from a small rent­ed stu­dio next door to Kul­tura Zvuku, the music school Bobylev co-runs in the city’s down­town dis­trict of Podil, Gaso­line Radio con­nects lis­ten­ers across Kyiv’s cul­tur­al com­mu­ni­ty and beyond. Since it was launched in the mid­dle of Rus­si­a’s full-scape inva­sion, its pro­gram­ming has pro­vid­ed a con­sis­tent NTS-rivalling sched­ule of cura­tors from Kyiv’s under­ground elec­tron­ic scene and beyond. Gaso­line plays music that has a foot in the city’s club cul­ture but whose roots go deep­er into Ukrain­ian her­itage, shared mem­o­ry and a desire to re-estab­lish a sense of home­grown vis­i­bil­i­ty that the two felt was miss­ing from the land­scape, even before the war.

“There was no spe­cialised media that could rep­re­sent Ukraine for Ukraini­ans,” Makarenko explains, ​“because for a long time we were look­ing for some­thing out­side Ukraine.” The duo found this reflect­ed in nightlife, where arts venues like Clos­er and club nights like Cxe­ma were help­ing spread a vital­i­ty towards under­ground cul­ture, par­tic­u­lar­ly amongst the younger gen­er­a­tion who’d come of age in and around the decade fol­low­ing the Maid­an rev­o­lu­tion. The abil­i­ty for west­ern Euro­peans to get to the city on bud­get flights also helped boost the city’s rep­u­ta­tion inter­na­tion­al­ly. Yet, with­in this vibrant cul­tur­al land­scape, cer­tain sounds – pre­dom­i­nant­ly tech­no, elec­tro and its splin­ter­ing sub-gen­res – were giv­en prime visibility.

“In every club line­up you could find only ten names, only pop­u­lar names. There was no place for young artists.” Makarenko says. ​“It was super hard because the scene was focused on one direc­tion in music. We don’t have a big pool of selec­tors in Ukraine that are play­ing a dif­fer­ent kind of music because there was not a wide range of venues, and for lots of artists, play­ing dance­floor-ori­ent­ed music was the only way to get clos­er to being in the community.”

With the idea devel­op­ing for a com­mu­ni­ty radio sta­tion that would allow cura­tors to go deep and explore sounds beyond dance­floor expec­ta­tions, the pair got to work, but then world events hap­pened. ​“We made the first announce­ment that we’d be launch­ing in Feb­ru­ary ​’22,” Makarenko says, look­ing back with a shrug.

It’s now just over a year since the station’s launch and, at the time of writ­ing, their dai­ly operation’s biggest wor­ries aren’t those asso­ci­at­ed with the most imme­di­ate con­se­quences of war, but of a sub­se­quent lack of resources. There has­n’t been heavy shelling or pow­er short­ages for sev­er­al months now. Life in Kyiv goes on: peo­ple go to work and do sports, cafés, bars and restau­rants are open, the print edi­tion of Vogue Ukraine resumed in mid-April and, with­in the con­straints of a dai­ly mid­night cur­few, the club scene has adjust­ed to host­ing day par­ties. ​“Now we all watch the news, read news and donate mon­ey,” says Maya Bak­lano­va, writer, par­ty organ­is­er and co-founder of the much missed cul­tur­al plat­form Tight. ​“And in dai­ly life there’s a lot of sad news of some­one you knew or donat­ed mon­ey to, but in gen­er­al life is still going on thanks to our armed forces.”

In a city where a big part of resis­tance comes from car­ry­ing on, cul­ture has two clear roles to play. On a finan­cial lev­el, every­thing from exhi­bi­tions to par­ties have become focussed on col­lect­ing mon­ey for dif­fer­ent ini­tia­tives, such as the Zelen­skyy-launched UNITED24, designed to allo­cate dona­tions across defence and de-min­ing, med­ical aid and rede­vel­op­ment efforts. On anoth­er lev­el, culture’s role as an ampli­fi­er of the spir­it has become heightened.

“Gasoline’s role is extreme­ly impor­tant,” Bak­lano­va says, ​“I don’t think they (at the sta­tion) under­stand how big their role is.”

Now, over a year into broad­cast­ing, Gaso­line Radio’s clos­est com­par­isons are inter­na­tion­al – like the afore­men­tioned Lon­don-based NTS, whose mis­sion to feed curi­ous minds echoes Makarenko and Bobylev’s aim to dig into Ukrain­ian cul­ture, or new­er enter­pris­es like Berlin’s Refuge World­wide, which grew out of a fundrais­ing plat­form set to help the influx of refugees with­in Ger­many. Then there’s Munich’s Radio8000 and Poland’s Radio Kap­i­tal – all stream­ing plat­forms that rep­re­sent dif­fer­ent com­mu­ni­ties with­out the reg­u­la­tions of com­mer­cial broad­cast­ers, allow­ing cura­tors the free­dom to exper­i­ment and expand region­al son­ic dialogue.

“We have a lot of cas­es when tech­no DJs have come to us to play guest mix­es and have decid­ed to play instead some clas­si­cal music from Ukrain­ian com­posers,” Makarenko says, feel­ing a change in the air, ​“which is super nice because after that we had a lot of feed­back from peo­ple say­ing ​‘oh, my grand­pa is lis­ten­ing to Gaso­line Radio!’”

“Gaso­line doesn’t earn mon­ey,” Bak­lano­va clar­i­fies, ​“they do it just because they want to pro­mote Ukrain­ian cul­ture dur­ing the war and act as a plat­form for peo­ple who stay in Ukraine.” But pro­vid­ing a cul­tur­al plat­form on a vol­un­tary basis, with lim­it­ed resources is exhaust­ing. ​“This sit­u­a­tion also has an impact on the team,” Makarenko adds, ​“as there are not many peo­ple involved in the project and we’re all bal­anc­ing full-time work with radio tasks.”

The term ​“West­splain­ing” comes up mul­ti­ple times in con­ver­sa­tions I have with cul­tur­al rep­re­sen­ta­tives in Kyiv. West­splain­ing refers to atti­tudes the West has towards Ukraine and the war – about not sup­ply­ing arms, instead broad­ly pro­claim­ing a desire for peace, and how this comes with­out an under­stand­ing of the long his­to­ry of Russ­ian dom­i­nance over Ukraine. West­splain­ing also fil­ters into Euro­pean con­ver­sa­tions that ques­tion the impor­tance of cul­tur­al activ­i­ties, such as launch­ing a radio sta­tion, dur­ing wartime.

“It may seem weird for peo­ple abroad that we still have restau­rants open, par­ties, con­certs, that we dance and smile,” says Andrew Bez, who switch­es from his day job as a for­eign media cor­re­spon­dent to host­ing on Gaso­line. ​“Prob­a­bly they can’t real­ly under­stand this. And I hope they nev­er can. For us it’s a way to show each oth­er that we’re not going to die, we have our life and this is what we’re defend­ing. So it’s the same with Gaso­line: they work for musi­cal com­mu­ni­ty to exist, they keep the fire burning.”

“Com­mu­ni­ty is an exchange of atten­tion, ideas and sup­port,” Bez goes on to say, ​“And then cul­tur­al projects appear. At the very begin­ning of the inva­sion fear, pan­ic and con­fu­sion almost stopped and destroyed every­thing in our lives, but then very quick­ly peo­ple start­ed to get back to man­age things. Because we under­stood that this is an impor­tant part of resis­tance – to keep alive, love, cre­ate and work. It’s about the econ­o­my of course, but also it’s about a state of mind. We would nev­er sur­vive if we were just sit­ting and cry­ing desperately.”

“It’s impor­tant to have a pos­si­bil­i­ty to express your­self dur­ing the full-scale war,” Sasha Potrox, the host of one of Gaso­line Radio’s most reg­u­lar shows, REJOICED, tells me. ​“Our radio helps DJs, musi­cians and authors with the equip­ment and stu­dio in case you lost yours or you’re not well-off [enough] to buy some­thing.” Although Sasha has been mix­ing since the age of 13, per­form­ing at school par­ties in his fam­i­ly home region of Luhan­sk, he’d trained as a banker and felt he’d nev­er have the pos­si­bil­i­ty to play records on radio until he saw the news about Gaso­line. Potrox began plan­ning his week­ly show under reg­u­lar mis­sile attacks, work­ing remote­ly, with the show’s design­er cre­at­ing the art­work from a shel­ter and their engi­neer strug­gling through elec­tric­i­ty black­outs to mas­ter the podcast.

“The most dif­fi­cult episode we pre­pared was with Nina­sup­sa (a Geor­gian DJ & Mutant Radio’s co-founder),” Potrox goes on to say. ​“Last Novem­ber we were fac­ing Russ­ian mis­sile attacks con­stant­ly, and in the few days before the release date my phone broke, we were with­out elec­tric­i­ty and water for 2.5 days and received the art­work from our design­er in the last minute before the drop. Against all the odds, we did it.”

Gasoline’s pres­ence as a ²⁴⁄₇, glob­al­ly avail­able plat­form offers a bridge of inter­na­tion­al vis­i­bil­i­ty. Despite the uncer­tain­ties of broad­cast­ing dur­ing an ongo­ing war and stretched resources, Makarenko sounds tired but pos­i­tive on the day we speak: ​“I real­ly enjoy the feel­ing that every­thing for the scene is chang­ing,” he says. ​“That it’s form­ing in some new ways with a new vision, that we are not these vic­tims but we are strong, and that this is a brighter vision of the future.”

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Images in col­lage cour­tesy of Gaso­line Radio and Wiki­Com­mons.