Dance against war – Chicago Reader

This reporting was supported by the International Women’s Media Foundation’s Women on the Ground: Reporting from Ukraine’s Unseen Frontlines Initiative in partnership with the Howard G. Buffett Foundation.

Just after sunset on a Saturday in April 2025, the fog machine at Kyiv’s hottest techno club, K41, was already working overtime. I could barely see a foot in front of me, so I kept my hand on the shoulder of my Ukrainian friend Tetiana Burianova as we weaved through partiers in fetish gear, pasties, or the standard black tee and Salomon shoes. 

Formally called ∄ (a mathematical symbol indicating “does not exist”), K41 is famous for hard techno, but it’s also firmly rooted in the inclusive ethos of Chicago house. The club is a queer safe space, with no windows and a strict ban on photography and video. Outside, the last light of dusk was still visible, but inside, the darkness, the packed crowd, the programmed lights, and the thick cloud of vape smoke and sweat made the party feel convincingly like an after-hours rave—especially because I was sleep-deprived after a week of nightly air-raid sirens. 

Since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022, Kyiv has been under a strict midnight curfew. Venues close at 11 PM to give revelers time to get home before transit shuts down and the real trouble starts. Attacks have ramped up dramatically since Trump took office again—in July, Russia launched more than 6,400 missiles and drones into Ukraine, the highest monthly total of the war. Phone out of battery? Can’t find an Uber? Tough luck. That encore better be worth risking a fine, police detention, or even your life.

It was only 8 PM, but by wartime math, we were fashionably late. 

The Ukrainian capital’s nightlife was vastly different just a few years ago, before the invasion turned the country into the site of the biggest European conflict since World War II. Kyiv’s electronic scene became famous in the 2010s for marathon sets, insatiable audiences, and experimental excesses, but it has contracted sharply during the war. It’s also grown more caring, community driven, and tight-knit. The city’s parties are more than just a balm for the trauma of years of Russian attacks; they’re literally helping Ukrainians survive by raising money for the country’s military.

“We aren’t just hedonists partying during war,” says Borys Stepanenko, 41, a DJ and cofounder of Kyiv shop ABO Records. The store opened in August 2022, just a few months after Russian forces were pushed out of the region. Early in the invasion, Stepanenko stopped DJing for a while and thought about quitting the music business entirely. But he and other DJs have come to understand that it would be a self-inflicted wound to shy away from throwing loud, joyful parties.

Thanks to their dedication, spaces to get lost in the music endure. Wartime Kyiv has emerged as an unlikely sanctuary for not just the rhythms that define Chicago house but also the communal values from which the genre emerged. 

In February 2022, Sergey Yatsenko was looking forward to hosting Chicago house artists for his 42nd birthday bash. 

It had been a good couple of years for the Dnipro native. Yatsenko is a cofounder of dance club and cultural center Closer, which is built into a cavernous former ribbon factory, and he’s put the space to good use. There’s ample room for concert stages, art exhibitions, cinema screenings, lectures, street-food vendors, and more. Before the war, Closer’s flagship festivals, Strichka (Ukrainian for “ribbon”) and Brave! Factory, were drawing thousands of people each May and August, respectively. Its regular music programming, famous for sets that went on as long as people kept dancing, fueled Kyiv’s rising reputation as one of Europe’s best places to party.

Yatsenko, a lifelong house head, had just the lineup booked to celebrate—Honey Dijon and the Blessed Madonna (both familiar to regulars at Chicago’s Smart Bar) and French deep-house producer Dyed Soundorom.

“But I was just dreaming,” says Yatsenko. “They didn’t come.” 

Two weeks later, Russian forces attacked Ukraine on three fronts—in the Donbas region in the east, from Crimea in the south, and across the border with Belarus in the north. The latter included a ground invasion of Kyiv. Instead of bumping wall-to-wall with crowds swaying to driving beats, Closer would be quiet for months to come. 

Since then, Yatsenko hasn’t been able to hear what he considers real live Chicago house music straight from the source, but he keeps it present. When I met him at Closer in April of this year, his close friend Stepanenko, a fellow house head and Closer resident, was outside in the club’s garden space spinning an all-vinyl set inspired by what he calls the “nasty Chicago house” sound. 

I sat inside with Yatsenko in the vintage furniture shop that’s tucked away in Closer’s maze of corridors. It’s filled with Bauhaus couches and modern reading chairs, and Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy is rumored to have an armchair on back order. As soon as I mentioned that I was a journalist with the Chicago Reader, he smiled and said, “Oh cool, Chicago city for the house music.”

Yatsenko grew up in the 90s in what he calls a “regular Soviet family.” He doesn’t remember hearing music played in the house, so his awakening came through local radio, where he heard mixes of artists such as Aphex Twin, Green Velvet, and Derrick Carter. He collected Russian magazines that covered rave culture, most notably Ptyuch. Western cultural commodities were still difficult to get.

“If you had this magazine, you are the boss and everybody wants to speak with you, because you know what they are writing about music,” Yatsenko says.

Stepanenko has had a similar journey. ABO Records has the only collection of old-school house records in Kyiv, a small but expertly curated selection sourced from labels all over the world—Strictly Rhythm, Fragile, Two Step, Natural. As a kid in the 90s, he could only get his hands on mainstream electronic CDs and tapes that in retrospect he says are “not even worth mentioning.” Back then, only the smallest stores sold a respectable variety of international music. When he started collecting, he soon found legendary Chicago label Trax Records.

“Chicago music, when I discovered it, it really changed my view,” Stepanenko says. “I think it was my biggest, earliest influence. I read and discovered every single that preceded [Trax] and what was after.”

By the early 2000s, Derrick Carter, DJ Sneak, and other Chicago house DJs were regularly touring in Eastern Europe, giving folks used to Berlin’s stripped-down sound the opportunity to experience house in person. Yatsenko caught his first house show at Romania’s Sunwaves Festival in 2008. He’d bought a ticket because he was intrigued by the bill, which included minimal techno DJ Ricardo Villalobos and DJ Sneak playing back-to-back on the same stage. “Usually it’s not possible to see” such a combination, he says. 

Standing in the crowd as the duo went on, he felt confusion shift into excitement. “[There] was maybe like four thousand people on the dance floor, and they played 132 BPMs, quite fast,” Yatsenko says. “It was all the way house music, but quite fast and quite pumpy. It was lots of surprises. It was like a new invention. We just didn’t hear [any]thing similar.”

International exchange has always included the dissemination of music. And whenever Ukraine’s physical borders have been permeable, the country’s electronic music scene has been transformed by an infusion of new records, influences, and people. After the fall of the Iron Curtain in 1989 and Ukraine’s independence in 1991, American records made their way into the former Eastern Bloc and fell into the capable hands of producers such as Stepanenko and Yatsenko. 

When Ukraine’s scene blossomed into a global electronic music destination in the 2010s, it was also the result of political turbulence and democratic victories.

In late 2013, Ukrainian president Viktor Yanukovych turned his back on an agreement that would have put Ukraine on a path to enter the European Union. It had been overwhelmingly approved by the country’s parliament, and Yanukovych himself had seemed to support it—but under intense economic pressure from Putin, he chose instead to align with Russia. As the possibility of EU membership slipped away, young Ukrainians saw their dreams of freedom, mobility, and better jobs go with it. Tens of thousands gathered in Kyiv’s Independence Square, called Maidan Nezalezhnosti, and their defiant protest grew into the largest democratic mass movement in Europe since 1989.

The Maidan Revolution culminated in the February 2014 removal of Yanukovych, who’s been living in exile in Russia ever since. That victory came at a steep price: Security forces killed more than a hundred protesters, most of them targeted by snipers or shot at closer range by police. 

During the months of unrest, aboveground nightlife was suspended, so Kyiv events collective Cxema threw underground parties in abandoned factories and under bridges, serving glitchy, droney techno music to Ukrainian youth surviving economic and political crisis.

For Ukraine’s club scene, the end of the revolution was a turning point. What had started as sporadic illegal parties marred by police raids suddenly went mainstream amid international recognition from venerable media outlets such as Dazed, i-D, and Mixmag. 

In 2017, Ukrainians were granted visa-free travel to the European Union. Cheap flights started popping up between Kyiv and big cities with thriving club cultures—Berlin, Barcelona, London—bringing international DJs in and sending Ukrainian ravers out.

“This helped our younger population to see the world, to learn something new,” Stepanenko says. “It was a very fruitful time when new parties were happening all the time. We saw a lot of interest from people from abroad who were just coming to have a good party. A good long party.”

In November 2019, K41 opened its doors on Kyrylivska Street, the source of the “K” in its nickname. It’s run by an anonymous team whose members have still not been identified. Their decision to make the venue an LGBTQ+ safe space was inspired by a visit to legendary Berlin club Berghain and the freedom they could feel there. A K41 team member explained the difference between Berlin and Kyiv for The Face in 2022: “When I go partying in Berlin or Paris, I always feel that people take their freedom for granted because it’s normal for them,” they said. “When Ukrainians go to Kyrylivska Street, they don’t take this freedom for granted because outside of that street they can’t be themselves in the same way.” 

In Ukrainian society, homosexuality and gender nonconformity are still hugely taboo, and same-sex marriage remains illegal. To protect the privacy of partiers and help them enjoy being fully themselves, K41 enforces its “no photos or video” policy by requiring everyone to tape over their camera lenses at the door.  

K41 and Closer share a mission to bring up the next generation of global Ukrainian DJs. In the community programming at Closer, Yatsenko tries to mimic his own omnivorous formative process. He wants people who come to the club to feel like he did back then, searching across the radio dial for mixes and poring over magazines, digging indiscriminately into disco, gabber, minimal, and every other style he encountered. 

Yatsenko hopes Closer can capture the vitality and variety the Ukrainian scene enjoyed before war isolated the country. “It’s educational that people were not [bound by] this border,” Yatsenko says. “So they start listening and realize that there are lots of super nice electronic artists. Maybe they are not popular, but they really deserve to be listened to and to be here.”

K41 operates an on-site music production school called Module Exchange, where anyone can learn the ropes; talks by international DJs also help students deepen their knowledge. This commitment to giving back was a huge part of what drew Alinka, 44, to Kyiv early in her DJ career. Though born in Ukraine, she spent her formative years in Chicago, where she’d established herself as a DJ by her mid-30s—in 2014, she cofounded Twirl Recordings with Smart Bar resident Shaun J. Wright. But in 2015 she took a leap of faith and moved permanently to Berlin to explore the European scene. 

Kyiv stood out to Alinka right away. “It was one of the few places that I traveled where I felt like I could just grow and build something based on my skills and not anything shallow or industry based,” she says. “When I first started going there, I wasn’t a huge name, [but] they didn’t give a fuck. They cared more about the music.” 

She may not have been big then, but Alinka is a staple in Kyiv now, regularly playing at-capacity shows rooted in Chicago house music and occasionally giving talks on gender in house as part of K41’s programming. In May, K41 announced her as its first international resident. 

“The world kind of looks at Berlin because of the culture and the history and the importance of the music there,” Alinka says. “But I think Kyiv has its own thing, and the quality deserves its own spotlight.” 

The scale of Russia’s assault on Ukraine is hard to grasp from afar. Russia annexed Crimea in 2014, and it now controls about a fifth of Ukraine’s territory. At least 1.5 million Ukrainians live under occupation. Every day, Russian tanks and infantry inch westward, aiming to claim even more ground. Since 2022, constant missile and drone attacks have killed more than 13,500 civilians and forced more than nine million people out of their homes—5.6 million of whom have fled the country entirely. Estimated damage to infrastructure has topped $176 billion, according to the World Bank, and the cost will be shouldered by generations to come.

Stepanenko wasn’t the only DJ who stopped working when the war started. Many of his peers likewise struggled to justify making, playing, and partying to music as Russia bombed their country and their city into an unrecognizable landscape.

“I think it was not just me but all of us,” Stepanenko says. “We were questioning ourselves—like if what I’m doing is important. Because if you’re not a doctor, if you’re not a soldier, then you question in yourself, how should I help my relatives? My country?” 

During the first week of Russia’s 2022 assault, K41 converted its space—a former brewery—into temporary housing for almost 200 people seeking shelter from the ground invasion. The Closer team welded together pieces of beams from festival stages to make hedgehogs—spiky steel obstacles resembling giant toy jacks, placed in the street to deter tanks. The on-site cafe staff cooked meals for local hospitals. By April, the unexpected force of Ukrainian resistance had pushed the Russians out of Kyiv.

Closer returned to holding events, but the first few featured slower, quieter music. “We just started doing a little bit of a dance party, because we think that people just need to switch off from this news,” Yatsenko says.

But it soon became obvious that what people needed was a semblance of normal life. And for many youth, that meant having a spot to let loose on a Friday night. 

“People do [create] culture during the war,” Yatsenko says. “They think that maybe they’re doing something not correct or not right for this period. Maybe it’s better to go to war. And we just try to [say] that it is important.” 

Yatsenko says it was actually more disorienting to completely stop his routines and hobbies as a response to the invasion. He wants to keep Closer open and thriving not because he imagines clubbing will keep the war at bay but rather because he knows it’s going to creep in no matter what he does. 

“You go home after the party and then you sit under the bed to feel and listen to some missiles,” he says. “You wake up and you read the news that ten people die.” 

The entire industry had to adjust to operate in the new reality of war. One nonnegotiable factor was the midnight curfew dictated by martial law. Kyiv had been notorious for indulgent all-night DJ sets that regularly lasted up to 17 hours. Back then, Stepanenko says, people showed up around 2 or 3 AM, and DJs weren’t required to stop playing at any particular time. Now most events start at 4 PM and end by 11 PM.

The sound has also changed.

Stepanenko has modified his sets—no siren effects, no lyrics in Russian, no tracks from Russian producers. (A large percentage of Ukrainians can speak Russian, but in Kyiv it’s now frowned upon to use the language in public.) He used to collaborate often with Russian artists—“There was a bit of connection always between Kyiv and Moscow in terms of parties”—but he’s since cut all ties.

As for house music, Yatsenko says interest in its soulful, flowing melodies has been “very down” during the war. “People just prefer more harder music or minimal music,” he laments. 

The war has also forced Ukraine’s club scene to take on a role that might seem antithetical to its roots in a subversive underground—it’s become a fundraising network for the military. 

K41, Closer, and ABO Records all donate part of their revenue to army units, often tied to former employees or regulars who’ve gone to fight. “So no Red Cross, no like this peaceful charity,” Stepanenko says, referring to the $3.7 billion in humanitarian aid the U.S. has given Ukraine since 2022. “We help with relatively small donations that help our friends who are on the front line.”

Ukrainians make these pleas for donations using QR codes on concert flyers and social media, much like Chicagoans running their own fundraisers for friends. But instead of paying rent or a hospital bill, Ukrainians will be trying to repair a broken-down tank or upgrade a drone-detection system. K41 has raised almost a million dollars this way, much of it for the 72nd Mechanized Brigade, one of the infantry units that defended Kyiv during Russia’s initial invasion. The brigade bears the honorific “Black Zaporozhians,” after a cavalry unit active during the Ukrainian–Soviet War more than a century ago.

Despite efforts to continue as usual, the Ukrainian scene has hemorrhaged talent. Since Russia’s 2014 invasion of Crimea (and especially since 2022), many top DJs have left Ukraine—some to preserve their careers, which depend on being able to tour internationally, and some to protect their lives. 

Not all electronic-music enthusiasts prefer to avoid full-time military service, though. When the war started, the staff of a venue Yatsenko frequented in Dnipro went to fight on the front lines. “So the whole team—like, the owner, the art director, and bartenders—six people [went], and one of them died,” he says. “The others are still in the war.”

Even among committed soldiers, some use their precious time off (30 days per year) to go clubbing at their old haunts—including Closer. “I saw even two of our regular visitors, but now one of them without a leg,” says Yatsenko. “He came for the party every time when he returned from the front line.”

At 9 PM on that April Saturday at K41, Dutch DJ Albert van Abbe was building his set to a climax. The trendy beats were fast and minimal, aligned with the club’s hard techno aesthetic. 

Tetiana was nowhere to be seen. I’m sure she was mingling with industry people she knew from her former life as a party planner, before she became a video producer for foreign media organizations (NPR, the Washington Post) that needed a “fixer” on the front lines. Tomorrow morning, I’ll be driven seven hours to Dnipro, about 60 miles from Russian-controlled territory. I try to forget my anxiety about the day to come while swaying to avoid the six-foot-four shirtless guy who’d already spilled his beer on me. I was also ignoring the countdown in my head—60 minutes till this hypnotic, soothing trance ends. But I knew I was privileged to be heading home to Chicago at the end of the week—most Ukrainians who want to leave either can’t afford it or can’t do it legally.

The stubborn refusal to fold under attack, says Alinka, is the most inspiring thing about the Ukrainian scene. “It reminded me what it all can be—the need for community and the power of electronic music as a force of resistance and celebration of resilience in such a difficult time,” she explains. “Because, you know, how many places are having this insane club scene during a full-scale invasion?” 

When air-raid sirens soundtrack every day and night, when friends return from combat with missing limbs if at all, when tomorrow isn’t guaranteed, sometimes you need a few hours to forget it all. The commitment to safety and inclusion that made Chicago house revolutionary has found expression at Closer and in clubs across Ukraine, even the ones that aren’t playing house music. When the outside world is dangerous, the dance floor remains sacred ground.