East Piano
Duration
Year
Topics
Language
Subtitles
English
30 min
2025
war,
music
Lithuanian
Before Russia's full-scale invasion, Timur made experimental electronic music in Kyiv under the name John Object. He walked through life with open ears, picking up unusual sounds to use in his compositions. Then on the third day of the invasion, he joined the Ukrainian Army. As a soldier, Timur still finds a few moments to tune into the sounds around him: the staccato firing of a rifle, the dissonant tone of air-raid sirens, a pianist playing in the mess hall. But his relationship to the aural environment is to change as the war drags on.
Authors Cicely Fell, Timur Dzhafarov
Producer Cicely Fell
Location Recordings and Music Timur Dzhafarov
A Falling Tree production for BBC Radio Three
Cicely Fell
Audio documentary maker. Her work as an independent producer blends human voices with field recordings, tracing the intersections between landscape, myth and memory. She began making features for Radio France International in Paris and has gone on to write and produce documentaries for the BBC World Service and BBC Radio 4 in Russia (“Siberian Stories”), Sri Lanka (“The Singing Fish of Batticaloa”), the UK (“Caribbean Domino Club”) and Oklahoma (“Dust Bowl Ballads”). Her work has won several international awards, including the Prix Marulic Gold prize for Best Documentary in 2017 for “Looping Swans” and Silver prize in 2023 for “Call Signs”.
Timur Dzhafarov (John Object)
He is a Ukrainian soldier and musician, born 1995, Kyiv. He has served in the Armed Forces of Ukraine since Russia’s genocidal full-scale invasion of Ukraine, and produced experimental electronic music as John Object before, playing at Ukraine’s own Cxema, Boiler Room, Brave! Factory Festival, and many European venues.