In His Words

I generally find it difficult to talk about myself. It is probably much easier to talk about somebody else. When you talk about yourself, you find yourself in a strange situation: praising yourself feels awkward, while criticising myself is something I can do perfectly well without anybody’s help.

I do not need a job. I am not looking for an employer, a position, or a workplace. So I see no point in publishing a detailed list saying that I enrolled somewhere in a particular year, worked somewhere else, or received a particular award. This is definitely not going to be a CV.

I am interested in completely different things — serious people with whom I can collaborate, develop projects, exchange ideas, and create something new. If somebody considering such a collaboration needs my detailed professional background, degrees, documents, publications, or proof of my qualifications, that is absolutely fine. I have all of it. But I am not interested in turning my life into an object of public discussion.

I am not hiding anything. I simply want to decide for myself which parts of my life are relevant to what I am doing today.

Because my former artistic career existed under an entirely different stage name. And it was not merely a stage name. Over time, an independent brand formed around it — a particular image and a particular way of life.

Many people know perfectly well who I am talking about. Others may simply not have connected that person with who I am today.

But I do not want to bring that brand back into my present life. Not because I reject my past. No. It was my life. My work. My experience.

It is simply that today I am doing different things. I have different ideas, different goals, and a completely different attitude towards many things. I do not want to create a new space only to begin discussing the person I once was all over again.

Yes, this is where it gets complicated. It is complicated because I genuinely cannot fit myself into a single definition.

Every morning begins with a note I have stuck to my refrigerator. I wrote it for myself one day. It says: “What can I do today to make the world a better place?”

Yes, perhaps that sounds a little grandiose. Perhaps it is not something I should talk about. Perhaps somebody will think it is somehow wrong. But at least… that is how it is.

And I genuinely cannot fit into just one of my roles. Because I have established myself as a person. I have established myself professionally. I have established myself as a musician, an artist, an actor, a researcher, an explorer. As a scientist? I do not know. It is difficult for me to call myself a scientist. To me, a scientist is someone much older. I am only fifty-four, and I still think of myself as a researcher — an explorer.

Although, well, I already have the degrees and the doctorate. But I do not stop. I keep learning. I try to keep my finger on the pulse. Anything new simply lights a fire in me. I get a real kick out of discovering something new. Sometimes I dive into it headfirst, because I find it fascinating.

I am interested in figuring things out. I am interested in getting to the heart of them. I want to analyse how something works, why it works, whom it affects, how we can work with it, and how it might be useful.

Because, ultimately, the first question is always: “What can I do today to make the world a better place?” Do you understand?

There is so much in this world that it is impossible to learn absolutely everything. One lifetime would not be enough. Ten lifetimes would not be enough. A hundred would not be enough to understand it all.

And so… there is never enough time. There is so little of it. That is why I do not spend time on social media or on promoting myself. I simply do not have time for it. Nor do I want to spend my time that way. What I want is to search, to study, and to learn.

That is probably it. And none of it fits neatly into a single, specific category.

That was probably a little chaotic. Anyway, throw half of it away—I won’t be offended.

Oh. Well, I suppose this part is all rather predictable. My mother was a performer, my father was a performer—both of them highly decorated artists. And my older sister…

I don’t know. I simply couldn’t imagine going off somewhere to study engineering. It felt slightly alien to me. Although—I don’t know—I do have a mathematical mind as well.

There were only so many schools I could apply to.

The theatre institute where my father once taught admitted a Russian-language acting class only once every—well, I can’t remember exactly now, and I don’t want to get it wrong—either every two years or every four years. That class was intended specifically for the Lesya Ukrainka Theatre. All the other classes were taught in Ukrainian, and I simply did not want to join a Ukrainian-language class.

Also—and people would probably see this differently today—but back then, during the Soviet period, it was considered deeply embarrassing for a child to enrol at the same institution where his father taught. You understand what I mean, right?

So everything began to point towards the Variety and Circus Arts College.

Our class was extraordinary, of course. A remarkable number of stars eventually emerged from it. But the system of education itself was even more interesting.

During the first year, they made almost no attempt to force you into a narrow professional box. Yes, there were separate variety arts and circus departments, but the education we received was extremely broad.

We studied acrobatics, gymnastics, balancing and trampoline. We learned to juggle, ride unicycles, and maintain our balance. God, the number of things that got broken at home while I was practising juggling…

At the same time, we had singing, acting, stage movement, choreography, and what they called “specialised subjects.” God, I was interested in everything.

I still remember the teachers.

My acrobatics teacher was always telling me:

“Look after your hands. You still need them to play.”

And the singing teacher might greet a student by saying:

“Go and eat something first. Your voice sounds hungry. Don’t come to me with a hungry voice.”

They were absolutely remarkable people.

Recently, I happened to see some young people in a park rehearsing a fire show with a staff. I caught myself being completely unable to walk past them. I went over and started explaining how to handle it more correctly from a technical point of view.

Decades have passed.

But all of it is still inside me.

Perhaps that is why I find it so difficult today to separate music, movement, acting, dramaturgy, and directing into distinct professions.

From the very beginning, I was taught to see the stage as a whole.

And so much came after that—the theatre department at the Academy, a master’s degree, postgraduate studies, doctoral studies, and the National Academy of Sciences.

Good grief. Am I really that clever? 😊

You asked me about it, and it turns out the memories are warm.

All right, that’s enough about education.

Unless, of course, you want to write an entire book about every place where I studied.

If we are talking about my first serious performances… Children of performers generally start working quite young. All the normal children would go off on their school holidays. Before the holidays began, we would go to rehearsals, because the New Year shows started during the holiday period.

But I remember my first real earnings perfectly well—the first money I was officially paid through payroll. It was during my first year at college. A large circus programme was opening at the Palace of Sports.

And I worked there as… ba-ba-ba-bam—a clown.

So the future musician earned his first professional money by working as a clown. As far as I remember, it was 14 roubles and 50 kopecks. Our student grant at the time was about twenty roubles. So it seemed like an absolutely incredible amount of money to me—practically for just a few performances that I also thoroughly enjoyed.

By our second year, most of us were already performing in shows, bands, concert programmes, and cabarets.

I do not want to be disingenuous and claim that a performer has no desire for recognition at all. As the saying goes, “A poor soldier is one who does not dream of becoming a general.” Right?

Of course you want your work to be noticed. To be understood. To be appreciated.

People first began recognising me while I was still at school, after I appeared on the television programme Silver Bell. So the word “star” very quickly lost any sort of mystical meaning for me. The people the entire country saw on television were, to me, simply people who sat beside me at the table or talked backstage.

Although, of course, there were periods in my life when I developed a few star-like affectations of my own.

That was exactly what happened when I was in my early twenties. I was crazy about heavy metal at the time. That period of my life is closely connected with it. But perhaps that is precisely the period I do not want to remember at all right now.

Maybe one day I will write a book about it, but not now.

I would like to tell one small story from that period.

I had a stage name. When the girls talked about me among themselves, they called me DD. One of them was very taken with me, and she had a tattoo done on her chest. She showed it to me.

From the lofty heights of my own stardom, I made fun of it and… hurt her very deeply.

We never saw each other again. But for some reason, that moment stayed with me for many years.

Later, when I began re-examining my life, I returned to that story as well. Eventually, a song grew out of it.

Perhaps today I would simply like to apologise to her. Not interfere in her life or deliberately try to find her—by now, she almost certainly has a family and a story of her own.

But it would be the right thing to do.

Songs.

A lot of them. Just a huge number.

I can’t say I hadn’t written songs before. Of course I had. A lot of them.

But back then, very often it was simply professional work.

Someone could come to me and say: we need this kind of song, on this subject, for this artist. Fine. If it needs to be done, it gets done.

I would write it, get paid, and let it go without any problem at all.

It never bothered me that the song might later live under someone else’s name. I had sold it. Everything was fair.

I think I treated those songs a bit like birds.

You write one — and let it fly.

Not even like homing pigeons, because pigeons are supposed to come back. These songs weren’t.

They just flew away and went on living their own lives.

And I was completely fine with that.

Writing itself always came fairly easily to me. A rhyme could appear on its own. A melody too. Sometimes I would see colleagues spending forever on a single song, but for me there was never some huge internal struggle involved.

The main thing was probably knowing when to stop.

After 2017, though, something changed.

Songs started pouring out of me, one after another.

Poems. Lyrics. Music.

And more and more of them were things I could no longer simply give away and forget.

Because they were about me.

About things I had lived through.

About people.

About situations I would return to years later.

About things I had never said.

That’s probably why I often say that, for me, a song is something left unsaid.

What I can’t say directly to a person, I can sometimes say in a song.

Around that same period, one very small job helped me enormously.

There was a company making children’s projects. Nothing huge, no big production budgets. They simply needed some music and approached me.

I said yes.

It was simple children’s music, musical concepts for animated series, little songs, music for individual scenes.

Nothing grand.

But for me, it became a real outlet.

I suddenly found myself making music again not because I had to fit some image, not because there was a stage, a brand, or expectations attached to it.

I was doing it simply because I was interested.

And it brought me back to life in a very real way.

I think that’s where the new flow really started.

Then came new technologies, new tools, new ways of working with sound. And of course I wanted to dive into all of that and understand how it actually worked.

But that was the next door.

Well, I could probably start with: first, second, third, and so on.

First...

No, actually. Let me explain where this comes from first.

The world is changing. The tools are changing. Technology is moving forward at an unbelievable speed.

And our way of thinking is very often somewhere far behind.

I run into labels all the time. Especially now, when we talk about artificial intelligence.

We have a new tool. A genuinely good, very powerful assistant.

Artists, designers, people working with visual media — they have already been through much of this conversation. So why do we now have to go through exactly the same thing all over again in music? Can’t we learn at least something from the experience that already exists?

Above all, I believe in intellectual honesty.

I completely understand people who don’t want to work with artificial intelligence. More than that — I respect that. Everyone has their reasons.

What I find much harder to understand is something else.

When someone uses AI themselves — sometimes at many different stages, even in composing music — and then turns around and says that artificial intelligence is evil.

Let’s say you’re a brilliant musician. You can play every part yourself. You can record everything, sing it, mix it.

But the original spark came after you played something, put it into an AI tool, got a version back that caught your attention, and then you reworked it and made it your own.

Fine.

But then just be honest about the process.

Don’t pretend afterwards that artificial intelligence was never there.

And then there’s the opposite situation.

AI did practically everything: the lyrics, the music, the arrangement, maybe even the final sound. And then someone presents it as if the entire thing were completely their own work.

I don’t understand that either.

I really don’t want to make this about particular people. I know specific examples, but the point isn’t who they are.

The point is the attitude.

I think we finally need to stop asking only one question:

“Was AI used or not?”

Because saying “this was made by artificial intelligence” tells us almost nothing today.

What exactly was done?

At what stage?

What did the person do?

What did the tool do?

Now that is a meaningful conversation.

For me, a song doesn’t begin with technology at all.

It begins with whatever is inside a person.

A feeling.

Words you never said.

Pain. Joy. Happiness. A memory.

I’ve already said this: for me, a song is very often something left unsaid.

What I can’t say directly to another person, I say in a song.

And if you have that inside you, technology can help you bring it together. Find a form for it. Try a different sound, a different arrangement, look at the idea from an angle you might never have considered before.

Sometimes I compare it to a book.

You wrote the book.

Artificial intelligence helped you create the cover.

That doesn’t suddenly mean the book is no longer yours.

Of course, that’s an extremely simplified comparison, but the principle is something like that.

And then people come to AI thinking: great, now the machine is going to do everything for me — so where’s all the money and success I was promised?

Except it doesn’t work that way.

Because you still have to work.

You still have to understand what you’re doing.

You still have to make an enormous number of decisions.

And most importantly, there still has to be something inside you.

If there’s nothing there, no AI is going to fix that.

Sure, you can try it. Make a few songs. Maybe even some very beautiful ones.

And then what?

There’s no real growth from there.

So the first thing I would like to do is help change the conversation around artificial intelligence in music.

Not promote AI. No!

Not convince everyone that this is how we all have to work from now on. No!

I want to bring some basic professional honesty back into the conversation and try to understand what technology actually does within the creative process — and what remains human.

Yes.

Because I keep seeing the same thing over and over again.

You open Facebook and it’s endless:

“Follow me.”

“Listen to my song.”

“Add me.”

“Support me.”

And sometimes I look at all this and think: guys, what the hell are you doing?

If you took all those people writing “follow me” in a single day and each of them brought just one song, you’d already have a huge playlist.

A hundred people — a hundred songs.

If each of those hundred people listened to that playlist just once, shared it with their friends, supported not only themselves but someone else alongside them — imagine the effect that could have.

Instead, everybody stands in their own little corner shouting:

“Me! Me! Look at me!”

We’ve become far too used to this idea of everybody being on their own.

Everyone for themselves.

I’d like to try the opposite.

To build a space where people don’t just promote themselves, but actually talk to one another.

Share knowledge.

Experience.

Tools.

Create things together.

Help each other.

Because there’s a phrase I always use:

“Talent needs a helping hand. Mediocrity somehow manages on its own.”

And I mean that in the best possible way.

The weak stuff usually falls away on its own eventually.

But if there’s a talented person — especially a young person — who genuinely has something to say, who has something burning inside them, why wouldn’t we help?

Sometimes a person is missing very little.

A contact.

A piece of knowledge.

Some advice.

A tool.

An opportunity.

Another person standing beside them.

That is the kind of environment I would also like to leave behind.

Yes. That would probably be the third one.

I would really like to preserve the sound of rare, unusual, lesser-known musical instruments for future generations.

Because there are so many of them.

Some sound absolutely extraordinary. They have unique timbres that could work beautifully in contemporary music, film, or almost anywhere else.

But most people simply have no idea these instruments even exist.

And this is an area where technology can be incredibly useful.

We can record them properly.

Document them.

Build libraries.

Preserve different playing techniques.

So that their sound doesn’t disappear along with the last musicians who still know how to play them.

And I have absolutely no interest in turning all of this into some kind of museum.

I want these instruments to stay alive.

I want a young musician twenty, thirty, fifty years from now to hear an instrument they’ve never encountered before and think:

“God, what a sound. What if I tried using that here?”

And suddenly that instrument has another life.

That’s what interests me.

Not only creating new technologies.

But using new technologies to make sure we don’t lose what existed long before us.

Those are three, for now.

There are actually many more.

Oh God, if I start going through all of them now, we’ll still be sitting here tomorrow.