Live music in wartime starts with looking for a power generator
War reaches into the working day, including the hours people set aside to make something of their own. For Ukrainian singer Kate Pavlenko, recording her solo project Monokate meant finding a studio with a generator and adapting a production around power cuts. Made in Kyiv in December 2025, her six-track live EP arrives with a story that extends beyond a change of artistic direction. It raises a question familiar to anyone whose future has become uncertain, although the circumstances here are more severe: how do you keep pursuing a life you have chosen when events beyond your control keep altering its conditions?
Pavlenko, formerly the frontwoman of Go_A, had already exchanged an established role, with performances and income, for the uncertainty of working independently. Songs that had circulated privately as demos became the basis of Monokate. Then came the practical demands of bringing that project into public view during wartime. According to the account accompanying Live in Kyiv, electricity outages forced the team to rethink the film’s visual concept and secure a suitably equipped studio. Further interruptions delayed the audio mixing. These are the details through which a vast crisis enters an individual project: a location that cannot serve its purpose, a plan that needs rewriting, work left waiting for power.
The session was self-funded, with Pavlenko learning audio software and taking responsibility for decisions across the edit, colour grading and final sound. Independence here carries a considerable burden of labour. There is money to earn before money can be spent, and technical knowledge to acquire before an idea can be realised. Making culture under these conditions also means organising around problems that artistic determination alone cannot solve. The generator matters as much to this account as any declaration of commitment. It makes the work possible. Giving that practical detail its due helps us understand what continuing to create actually asks of people.
Live in Kyiv brings together three revisited songs from her debut EP, Half of Me, and three previously unreleased tracks. The latter were intended for another release, before changes to the band’s line-up led Pavlenko to share them through this session. The project developed through adjustment, with earlier intentions giving way to what could be completed. Wartime invites outsiders to read every Ukrainian cultural work as a statement of national endurance. That interpretation can leave little space for personal ambition, uncertainty or the everyday satisfaction of finishing something. Pavlenko’s account makes room for those motives too. She wanted to pursue material of her own and present it with other musicians. Live in Kyiv gives that desire a public form, while its production reveals how much work goes into sustaining a creative life during war.