Oleh Shpudeiko is a Ukrainian-born music composer and sound artist who records as Heinali. He specialises in electronic music and modular synthesis, taking inspiration from Early music.
A self-taught electronic music composer, Oleh possesses a stylistically diverse catalogue including sound art and interdisciplinary works. However, in his core practice, he's been focused on reimagining medieval music with a modular synthesiser, an instrument that he sets up informed by artistic research, enabling him to improvise polyphony and monophony, borrowing techniques and ideas from medieval composers & theorists and contemporary fields of analogue synthesis & generative music—exploring intersections of the Providence and Contingency, the past and the present, technology and the sacred.
Beginning in the early 2000s with a handful of eclectic works, ranging from modern classical and ambient to experimental electronic and noise, Heinali came into broader international awareness with his 2020 MADRIGALS album featuring improvisations on period instruments over polyphonic textures generated on a modular synthesiser. It was named contemporary album of the month in The Guardian, shortlisted for the Aprize Music Award and Shevchenko National Prize. 'As if Palestrina composed music for little electric boxes with patch cords. Except it's the boxes that compose music like Palestrina', one reviewer observes. Oleh has been working on a generative polyphony and monophony patch for modular synthesis since early 2018, providing the backbone for his live sets and subsequent releases.
Heinali's latest album KYIV ETERNAL, released in 2023, is an intimate tribute to his home city under attack and a side-step from his established practice of reimagining early music. It features pre-war field recordings of Kyiv juxtaposed with ambient memory loops from Oleh's archives. Jason Farago described it in The New York Times as 'a ravishing audioscape of the Ukrainian capital' and 'a citywide portrait of beautiful resolution'.
In the same year, MoMA Magazine premiered Oleh's AVES RUBRAE ("red birds" in Latin), a composition commissioned by the Museum of Modern Art in New York. This work was a return to his core practice of drawing on medieval polyphony and the music of the band Coil, which influenced Shpudeiko as a young composer.
In 2024, Heinali, in collaboration with the singer Yasia Saienko, started their work on ГІЛЬДЕҐАРДА ('Hildegard' in Ukrainian) supported by Unsound, CTM Festival, Athens Epidaurus Festival / Subset, and GMEA - Centre National de Création Musicale Albi-Tarn—a unique reimagining of Hildegard von Bingen's music. It combines the vocal sound production approaches of authentic Ukrainian folk singing with the modular synthesis techniques drawing from high mediaeval polyphony and monophony. This approach, brought to life by Heinali and Yasia Saienko, a singer practising authentic Ukrainian vocal tradition, brings to the fore the paradoxical viscerality inherent to Hildegard's visionary writing. It serves as a mirror, reflecting, processing and transcending the wartime experience and exploring the raw spirituality emerging from it. Oleh and Yasia prepared the concert version of ГІЛЬДЕҐАРДА at a residency at an XII-century Cistercian Sylvanes Abbey in France. The subsequent premiere at Unsound was met with resounding success, described by Philip Sherburne as 'the most astonishingly gorgeous show'.
Alongside this catalogue as a solo musician, Heinali encompasses interdisciplinary, multi-media art projects and soundtracks. Shpudeiko's sound artworks, in collaboration with Ukrainian classically trained music composer Alexey Shmurak, are in the National Art Museum of Ukraine and Museum of Modern Art of Odesa collections. In 2016, Shpudeiko composed award-winning original music for the video game BOUND (Plastic/Sony Santa Monica) and the contemporary dance production A THREAD, choreographed by Jean Abreu and premiered at Southbank Centre. Around the same time, he began a new collaborative project with actor/choreographer Volodymyr Shpudeiko. Their SYNTHTAP production fuses tap dance and modular synthesis, a generative sound production that responds directly to the dancer's movements. In 2021 THE WALL reactive ballet, based on SYNTHTAP technology in collaboration with choreographer Illia Miroshnichenko, premiered at the Kyiv Municipal Academic Opera and Ballet Theatre to critical acclaim.
Oleh is also known for his collaboration with US poet Matt Finney. The meeting point of Finney's spoken word performance and Shpudeiko's droning electronics yields, according to Bandcamp, 'a soundtrack for fleeing in dreamlike slow motion from wolves across a frozen tundra'. Between 2011 and 2021 Finney and Shpudeiko released four collaborative albums of dark 'southern gothic' poetry collages.
Heinali's recorded works have been released on Injazero, Sony Interactive Entertainment, The Flenser, Opal Tapes and other labels. He has a long history of live performances, including appearances at venues and festivals such as CTM in Berlin, NEXT in Bratislava, Primavera in Barcelona, Musikprotokoll in Graz, Unsound in Krakow and Adelaide, Ephemera in Warsaw; Berlin's Berliner Dom, in collaboration with the Alter Ratio vocal ensemble; Kyiv's Plivka and Mystetskyi Arsenal; Ukraine's Next Sound festival and Berlin's Akademie der Künste.
Since 2019, Oleh has been a co-author and co-host, together with Alexey Shmurak, of the Ukrainian АШОШ education podcast and vlog. The podcast covers a wide range of music and sound-related topics in an accessible language, ranging from classical music history and theory to the phenomenology of groove to music as violence and sound as a weapon.
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