Kyiv is still raving, and it is still not a metaphor
Four years in, Closer and K41 are still open, Cxema still broadcasts monthly, and the parties still fund the army. Nobody involved is interested in being your symbol of resilience.
The line everyone quotes came from a 32-year-old at a party called Valeriia Shablii, talking to CNN:
It didn't die… We will rave on Putin's grave.
It is a good line. The better one is less quotable. Sergey Yatsenko, who co-founded Closer in a former ribbon factory in Podil, described the actual rhythm of it to the Chicago Reader:
You go home after the party and then you sit under the bed to feel and listen to some missiles. You wake up and you read the news that ten people die.
What is actually still running
Closer and K41 are both operating, with K41's in-house label Standard Deviation and resident Alinka. Cxema, founded by Slava Lepsheiev, still broadcasts monthly on NTS. ABO Records, a shop and label, opened in August 2022 and is still going. The Kultura Zvuku DJ school is training people. Muscut and Shukai keep releasing.
Borys Stepanenko of ABO gets at the thing that outside coverage keeps missing: "We aren't just hedonists partying during war." Parties are fundraising infrastructure. That is not a poetic framing, it is a line item.
What changed
Lepsheiev on how the meaning of the scene shifted: "Resistance was directed against the old system and Soviet inertia… After the full-scale invasion, the vector of resistance changed and is now directed against the enemy."
Two venues we listed in an earlier draft, ENCES and Otel', we could not confirm as currently open, so they are not on this list.
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