Oleh Shpudeiko, known as Heinali, is a sound artist and composer who has previously pushed the boundaries of Western musical tradition by adapting late Medieval and Renaissance polyphony for modular synthesizer. His previous albums, including Kyiv Eternal (2023) and Madrigals (2020), have earned him substantial critical praise. Adriana-Yaroslava (Yasia) Saienko arrived to Ukrainian folk song via the theater, following in the footsteps of some of Ukraine’s foremost musical innovators—including the actor-singers Uliana Horbachevska, Mariana Sadovska, and Jura Josyfovych—who thrive on the edge of tradition and experimentalism.

Both tracks on Hildegard center the primal combination of voice and drone. This simple and seductive pairing morphs in both its historical and technological associations, alternately evoking the thin sound of a sine wave and a blaring, reedy zurna, the high-church pipe organ and the folk lira (the hurdy-gurdy used by pre-modern Ukrainian bards), a pulsating buzzsaw and the noise of a helicopter passing overhead. The voice moves too, contracting from the space of a resonant cathedral (the album was recorded in the Cistercian Abbey of Sylvanès) to, in the opening of “O Tu Suavissima Virga,” a bone-dry close-miked sound: Hildegard’s devotional songs as an intimate lullaby. As performed by some ensembles, Hildegard’s music can embody meditative restraint, but when Saienko unleashes the full-throated avtentyka sound, her pitch bending with intensity, she reveals a spirit of wildness in the music.

The formula—Hildegard von Bingen’s compositions plus Ukrainian folk voice plus modular synth—may seem less than intuitive at first, but there’s a mutually reinforcing strangeness here between the passions of the medieval Christian saint, the haunting search for authenticity in the human voice, and the meticulous electronic generation of sounds that, at times, evoke acoustic instruments. The artists explain that they adapt Hildegard not in the service of a faithful reconstruction of historical performance practices but as a “distant mirror” that enables the Ukrainian artists to process and transcend their wartime experiences.

Hildegard’s religious visions were famously accompanied by disabling flashes of light (today theorized by some as symptoms of migraines). The artists, here, connect these painful visions to the explosive force of the missile that fell near Heinali’s studio in Kyiv after Russia’s 2022 full-scale invasion. The analogy is made explicit in the digital bonus track, which adapts a folk song once collected in the villages of Western Polissia by some of the student singers from the Kyiv Conservatory who sought the modern-authentic voice in the waning years of the USSR. On a 1990 cassette recording, now digitized, ethnomusicologist Iryna Klymenko sings the song without accompaniment: “Green oak tree, why did your leaves rustle so early?” In the original, a vignette of rural life unfolds. In this 2025 reimagination, Saienko suggests that the early morning noise was not the wind, but a sound of war, the inhuman disturbance and destructive flare of missile fire. In Hildegard, Heinali and Saienko provoke us to linger at the intersection of the medieval and the modern, the elemental and the eternal; of the rural voice, the traumatic experience, and the mystical vision.