Homing Part 1 | Archive Of Belonging & ILYICH

afterlife is a musical journey through fantastical stories, soundscapes and the pulse of a new beginning.

Conceiving the afterlife as something unfolding now, the album afterlife is responding to the military invasion of Ukraine with semi-fictional narratives, cinematic soundscapes, bass grooves and poems, string orchestras and broken beats. Afterlife is a practice of grieving and new beginnings, life after the latest moment of personal and collective history. The album embraces an uneasy place as the dawn of the fantastical. Accompanied by allied musicians of various genres, ILYICH embarks on this journey and explores its multidimensional map. The album invites the audience to join forces by listening, dancing and redreaming the world as a world after war.

Composed, arranged, written and produced by ILYICH. ILYICH is a musical project from the artist and musician Anton Kats. The name of the project comes from Anton’s middle name that was lost during his process of seeking asylum from Ukraine. He calls on the music to remember and recover a part of himself, a part of home, and a part of his future that was perhaps displaced through the process of forced migration.

ILYICH is part of Homing, a four part audio exhibition, presented online on archive of belonging. Each month the exhibition is reformated and a new mixtape introduced, as something to be carried easily, lightly.

For Homing, the artists and musicians were invited to make a mixtape (in the broadest sense of the term) in response to the complex question, what are the sounds of belonging? Especially considering that sound is the first sense we develop in the womb. And hearing our mother’s voice, discerning it from background noises, is our primal step of becoming an individual while still very much being more-than-an-individual, belonging in that moment to the womb, to our first home. We know this sense of home with all of our body, by just the first sounds we hear in this world.