Photo: Heinali Live at St. Sophia in Kyiv by Alina Garmash and Vitaliy Mariash.
Oleh Shpudeiko, known as Heinali, is a composer and sound artist whose work draws on the Western medieval music tradition through electronic music and modular synthesis.
Heinali performs his music on a modular synthesiser, an instrument that he sets up based on artistic research, which enables him to improvise both polyphony and monophony. He borrows techniques and ideas from medieval theory and composition, as well as from contemporary fields of analogue synthesis and generative music.
Oleh was born in 1985 in Kyiv, Ukraine. Beginning in the early 2000s with a handful of stylistically eclectic works, including his Southern Gothic collaboration with US poet Matt Finney and a series of modern classical and ambient releases, Heinali gained recognition with his 2020 album Madrigals, which featured improvisations on period instruments alongside polyphony generated on a modular synthesiser. It was named contemporary album of the month in The Guardian and was shortlisted for the Aprize Music Award and the Shevchenko National Prize.
Heinali's 2023 album, Kyiv Eternal, described by The New York Times as 'a ravishing audioscape' and 'a citywide portrait of beautiful resolution', is an intimate tribute to his home city under attack and a brief return to his early practice. It juxtaposes pre-war field recordings of Kyiv with ambient ‘memory loops’ from Oleh's music archives. In the same year, MoMA Magazine premiered Oleh's Aves Rubrae, a work based on Notre Dame polyphony commissioned by the Museum of Modern Art in New York.
In 2024, Heinali premiered Гільдеґарда (‘Hildegard’ in Ukrainian), reimagining Hildegard von Bingen’s music through modular synthesis and the authentic Ukrainian folk vocals of Andriana-Yaroslava Saienko. Framed as a reflection of wartime experience, the work highlights the physicality of Hildegard’s music. Philip Sherburne described the Unsound premiere as 'the most astonishingly gorgeous show'. The subsequent album release on the Unsound label has been met with critical acclaim. Pitchfork listed Гільдеґарда among the most anticipated albums and described it as 'into a chilling meditation on wartime trauma and the endurance of faith' in a review.
Shpudeiko's sound artworks, in partnership with Ukrainian classically trained composer Alexey Shmurak, are featured in the collections of the National Art Museum of Ukraine and the Museum of Modern Art of Odesa. In 2019, the duo launched the АШОШ education podcast, exploring a wide range of music and sound-related topics in accessible language, bridging the gaps between academic and amateur music discourses.
In 2016, Oleh composed award-winning original music for the video game Bound (Plastic/Sony Santa Monica) and, along with choreographer Volodymyr Shpudeiko, founded SynthTap—a performance that fuses tap dance with modular synthesis.
Heinali's works have been released on Unsound, Injazero, Sony Interactive Entertainment, The Flenser, Opal Tapes, and other labels. He has an extensive performance history, with appearances at festivals and venues including CTM (Berlin), Rewire (The Hague), Muziekgebouw (Amsterdam), Musikprotokoll (Graz), Next (Bratislava), Kiezsalon (Berlin), Primavera (Barcelona), Fiber (Amsterdam), Unsound (Krakow and Adelaide), Ephemera (Warsaw) as well as Plivka and Next Sound in Kyiv.
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