Here's the second of three articles from our partnership with Ukrainian music magazine, Neformat. This initative was supported by Music Export Ukraine, the Canada-Ukraine Foundation, and the Aid for Artists Committee.
Authors — Vadym Oliinykov, Yaryna Denysiuk | Ukrainian Version Here
Ereh Saw grew up in the black markets of the 90s Odesa, played the triangle in Berlin’s undergrounds, and collected dozens of plastic squeakers at flea markets to one day create his own sonic language.
He turns rubbish into music, improvisation into ritual, and chaos into therapy. He talks about noise as a journey — one that takes you through fluctuating currents, through the ruins of Soviet electronics, toward an imagined sound of the Universe.
This is a conversation not only about sound but about the experience of survival, the ability to listen, and the art of thinking beyond the manual.
N: You were born and raised in Odesa. What kind of environment was that? What was your teenage life like?
ES: I spent the first 17 years of my life in Odesa. Those were interesting times. Born under Brezhnev, then there was a rapid turnover of General Secretaries, and in 1986 Gorbachev came along, the Chornobyl reactor blew up, and Perestroika began.
Firstly, it’s important to say that I grew up mostly alone. My mother remarried, and I stayed with my grandmother, which gave me certain level of freedom ordinary kids didn’t have. Secondly, as a kid, I was very sick and spent several years in hospital — I had to learn to walk three times over. It was there that I started reading and drawing on my own, and when I finally went to school, it turned out that my level of interests didn’t align at all with the standard Soviet curriculum — they kept transferring me from one school to another. And that wasn’t because I was some sort of troublemaker; I just had my own view of things.
Odesa in the 1990s
In 1991, when the Soviet Union collapsed, I was twelve. But you should understand: this was Odesa.
Odesa is its own world — it’s difficult to compare it with any other city. There was always smuggling here, shady dealings with foreign currency, sailors bringing back all sorts of things; the black market was a constant presence. I needed money to maintain that level of freedom I’d carved out for myself, so I was always something of an adventurer. When Perestroika began and foreign tourists started coming to Odesa, I would sell or swap collectible items — Soviet memorabilia and the like.
It was a period of unbelievably rapid change. At first there was nothing at all, and then suddenly there was everything: Japanese and German cars, household appliances, cassettes, videos, books, clothes. Nearly everything genuinely interesting — like records or fashionable clothes — was brought in by sailors as contraband. I spent all my time hanging around the port terminal: if I wasn’t doing a quick deal with tourists, I could earn a bit working as a porter, because at the same time a whole convoy of cargo ships was bringing goods to the newly opened big wholesale market.
N: And is that when you started listening to music?
ES: Yes. It was mostly rave music. But it’s worth mentioning one very important moment — in 1995 Odesa hosted its first Two Days and Two Nights of New Music festival. It was a festival of academic avant-garde, but to me it felt as if aliens had landed.
The video is from 2009, but it perfectly captures the festival’s experimental spirit.
Imagine this: Lambada on television, poor pop music at the markets, and everyone around you was trying to buy and resell something. Everything was priced in dollars, even bread — the dollar was basically our first “national” currency.
The underground — that was rave culture with a very high entry barrier.
And in the middle of all this, Two Days and Two Nights — this avant-garde academic festival — it was utterly fascinating, and most importantly, there were no criteria by which to judge it. There was simply nothing to compare it to. It was an event that turned my world upside down. I think I wasn’t the only one.
The first two festivals took place in the building of the maritime station. There were a few thousand people there. In the context of 90s Odesa, it was like a gateway to the centre of the cultural universe: a red carpet, journalists everywhere, dedicated hotels for the composers who brought their own musicians because they wanted their works performed exactly as they’d envisioned them.
N: How did you end up at the contemporary academic music festival, coming from a rave crowd?
ES: It was really difficult to get in. The festival had a closed format — academics for academics. But I was part of the fartsovka movement — the black-market traders — so I had connections, and that opened certain doors. Someone I knew managed to get hold of one or two invitations, and we turned those into twenty or thirty with a copying machine. We kept a few for ourselves and sold the rest to tourists. It was a top event and the demand was massive. Buying tickets was impossible — they simply didn’t exist. There were only invitations: for the press, for participants, for ‘cultural representatives’…
N: In Ukraine, you’re known as a circuit-bending artist. But what did you start with? Did you pick up a soldering iron straight away? Or did you have a phase when you played more ‘traditional’ instruments?
ES: I can play the triangle in a Berlin underpass to earn five euros for a coffee and a sandwich. (laughs) That money’s basically given to you just so you’ll shut your triangle up.
N: Did you play on your own back then?
ES: (mimes playing the triangle) Pam! — pammm!
N: So you’ve never really played anything except your noise-makers?
ES: Well, sometime around year five at school, I held a guitar once in a music club. The teacher said I had a good ear, but to keep going I’d have needed my own guitar, and I didn’t have one.
In Soviet times you always had to be part of something — some club, some activity — so at every school I attended chess clubs, model aeroplane clubs, went swimming, spent three years at the young seamen’s school — I actually dreamt of becoming a sailor.
After school, I graduated from a maritime college; I thought I’d do my military service in the navy, but because of my poor eyesight they said, “You’ll be sweeping an airfield.” I decided I didn’t want to serve like that, so I left Odesa for Kyiv. That was 1997, but I didn’t stay long. I moved on to St Petersburg and ended up living there for the next ten years.
And it was there, quite by chance, through DIY-publishing, that I crossed paths with people who were already well known in the noise scene beyond the post-Soviet space. At first it was just conversations. And then, somehow, I found myself on stage with them.
N: How did you start playing solo?
ES: I only began performing solo much later. Back then, in the early 2000s, it was more of a fun really. I remember once someone arranged a tiny festival in a culture centre about forty kilometres outside St Petersburg. Beforehand, we had a drinking session to talk about what we’d use for the performance. We went to a flea market and bought every children’s toy we could find that made a sound — squeakers, bells, anything that rattled — packed it all into suitcases and took it with us. The idea was that at a certain point we’d just chuck the toys into the audience, so everyone could make noise with us. Total improv.
We carried on playing together for a while, but for me, it was nothing serious — whereas the guys were doing it professionally, with or without me. I have to admit, those were ten very interesting years of my life. There were times I had loads of money, and times I had no idea what I’d eat the next day. Sometimes I lived in studios or rented rooms, and for a few years I even crashed on balconies in student halls — I’ve plenty to remember!
Around 2007, I moved back to Odesa. Back then I was drinking a lot, and when I finally stopped — I suddenly had time. And with the same drive that I’d wake up drunk and fall asleep drunk, I started waking up and falling asleep with a soldering iron in my hand.
By that point, I already had a few suitcases stuffed with kids’ toys that squeaked, rang and blinked. For years, I’d just collected them from flea markets — at the time I had neither the space nor the tools to do anything with them. But somehow I was sure their time would come, and that either I’d finally make something from all that junk, or I’d have to throw it all away — and I just couldn’t do that. So…
By then, the internet was more modern, so you could find step-by-step videos showing you how to rewire a toy and turn it into an instrument. But I wasn’t interested in that — because I already had an idea of what I wanted to do. I didn’t want to copy someone else’s circuit — I wanted to work it out myself.
Everything was as primitive as it gets. You take the sound output — you’ve got two wires, plus and minus. You poke the positive into different parts of the microchip and listen to what changes. If something changes — you solder it. That’s it. You’ve got yourself an instrument. Later, instead of a direct connection, I started adding in random potentiometers, experimenting with whatever I had lying around.
When all this began, I wasn’t just looking for any sound — I was chasing the sound, that magical sound. A sound that hadn’t existed before. And when you found it — it was a huge rush, like sound therapy.
It’s worth saying, I didn’t even have a mixer — but the sounds I was pulling out of toys, bits of amplifiers, half-dead Soviet reverbs — I wanted to combine all that somehow. It was a total trash set-up: stuff you didn’t mind breaking, because it was already broken.
Without a mixer, it was a real trial. Every day I’d try to connect these sounds and watch little puffs of smoke rising from the wires. Some amazing bits of kit went up in smoke that way. Unfortunately. Pshhhh! — and that sound was gone forever, never to come back.
I burnt through loads of stuff. Honestly — loads. I’ve still got a few boxes of burnt-out microchips that died during experiments. Once, I even had an idea to make a suit out of them — a three-piece suit made of dead microchips! (laughs)
N: Do you think you’re mentally strong enough to handle all that?
ES: I wouldn’t say so. I’ve had my fair share of nervous breakdowns.
N: But you chose to take that risk. Why?
ES: Because I needed results. There’s this principle: if you can imagine something, you can make it happen. But you need time and resources. I suddenly had a bit of time, and I figured out a way to connect sounds from different toys and run them through an amplifier. I even made a sort of “manual”, and on my website there are tracks I recorded back then — from around 2016 to 2018. There’s a separate tab — toy-box.xyz/waste — where you can listen or download them.
Bandcamp New & Notable Mar 15, 2021
These sounds were all combined without a mixer, and for me it’s a real “symphony”. All those sound combinations mostly came from modified toys — their microchips, once “linked” together, would start changing their parameters. Because when you alter an electric circuit — various things fluctuate, including the power supply — the parameters of one component affect another, and you get a sound you’d never expect to hear.
That’s when I realised that these toy microchips just contain recorded sounds — samples — so if I could distort the recordings, why not try to make my own and then manipulate them? Why not find a way to record my own samples onto a chip?
So my next step was to figure out this process — it became a bit of an obsession!
In my head I imagined it like my own, well, you could say label. So I started researching how that could be done, or who might be able to help me. I reached out to toy manufacturers in China, even makers of musical greeting cards. But it was always the same answer: “Send us your file — we’ll burn you a thousand chips for $10,000.” And I was like — are you serious?
At the same time, I found out that there was a lab called “Lampa” at Kyiv Polytechnic Institute where you could work on your own projects, use an oscilloscope and other equipment — it sounded interesting because it was a chance to self-educate. So, around August 2017, I moved to the capital.
To have a roof over my head in Kyiv, I got a job in a hostel — it was convenient because I had both a place to stay and some work. But it turned out that for the first month and a half I basically didn’t leave the hostel building — I just had no one to cover my shifts. I’d wash, clean, check in guests, do the laundry, ironing, bookkeeping — and, of course, I had no time or energy left for music…
Later, a girl started covering for me, and only in October did I finally get a bit of free time — but it turned out working at “Lampa” wasn’t all that practical. So I arranged to work nights at a newly opened club called “Koschei”. That’s where I did my sound experiments and at the same time kept looking for ways to make the microchip idea happen.
And then — the Bitcoin boom. Prices were shooting up into the stratosphere. One day in the hostel I randomly ran into an old acquaintance. Over coffee, I told him about my project.
And he said: “Listen, we urgently need someone in China. We’ll give you the money — get your visa sorted, gather info on our Bitcoin stuff, and you can sort out your own microchip questions at the same time.” So I said, “OK, I’ll get the visa — we’ll see how it goes…”
Of course, I didn’t tell anyone about these “new” plans. As far as I remember, on 25 December 2017 the second “Шумоізоляція” (Shumoizolyatsiya, meaning ‘noise isolation’) festival was meant to happen. The poster was out — it clearly said Ereh Saw was performing.
But on 24 December, I just left for China. And I didn’t come back for three months.
I was going into the unknown. But I had a task, so I had to justify being there somehow. Naturally, I was also interested in microchips — I wanted to figure something out. No clear plan. Right after landing in Shanghai, I ended up at a three-day artificial intelligence conference. My mission was to find a particular person and get an interview with them. I walked in without registration — somehow, weirdly enough, that’s always worked for me. (laughs)
I have this odd knack for getting in anywhere — a buffet, a concert, an embassy reception — no ticket, no invite, I just show up and get in. It’s really weird, but it works. I first noticed it back in the 90s.
Next came Shenzhen — the world’s microchip manufacturing hub. I went there mainly for “Bitcoin business” too, but it was there, thanks to more lucky encounters, that I finally found microchips that you can actually load with your own samples.
N: Tell me about the philosophy behind your sound. As an artist, what’s more important to you — the concept or the sound itself as an object?
ES: I’ve never really thought of myself as an artist. And I can’t say that sound, for me, is purely a concept either. It’s more like a search: sometimes you stumble upon a sound that just captivates you. It doesn’t sound like anything else. It didn’t exist until that moment — and now it does. And it opens something up inside you.
That sound feels like an echo of something deeper. If space wasn’t a vacuum, maybe we could actually hear energy being born on the Sun. Or hear how the electromagnetic field shifts the moment a star is formed. Not just our star — any one of the millions out there. And I imagine that’s roughly what it might sound like — for me, it’s like travelling through the Universe without a spaceship. So if I can invite someone into that journey — that’s already amazing, because it’s about feeling, if I can put it that way. About experiencing the process together.
Often on stage, it all works totally differently than it does in the studio. For example, you might hear one thing in the room, but something completely different in the monitors on stage. So I usually try not to stand on stage at all — I’d rather be closer to the crowd, so I can hear what everyone else hears. Because this sound material — it’s alive. And you can only really work with it when you’re truly present inside it.
Bandcamp New & Notable Mar 15, 2021
N: Why are you so drawn to the sounds of space?
ES: I’ve always been fascinated by science. And my imagination — it’s basically like a diagnosis. We live out on the edge of the Milky Way. To the “capital city”, where new stars are born and supernovae explode — it’s about 260 light-years away.
And at the centre — it’s hell. There’s insane gravity, dust, fields, electromagnetic storms. Everything compresses, new stars are born. But us, our Solar System — we’re like a small village where nothing ever happens. And if you look further — there are billions more galaxies like ours. As a species, in the past eighty years, we’ve discovered as much about space as Columbus learned about America when he was trying to find India. Or, probably more accurately, what the indigenous people realised when Columbus turned up. We know a few things now, but it’s still just the beginning.
A long time ago, mathematicians figured out that Earth was round, but they didn’t have a proof for ages. It’s the same today — we have mathematical models of the Universe, but for many of them we still don’t have physical confirmation. I love connecting facts. That’s where my imagination — my “diagnosis” — kicks in again. For example, I like taking something we know from astronomy and connecting it with something completely different. And then that story starts to “sound” different.
And then you imagine — infinity. And it’s not actually as difficult as it seems. You just imagine it. Because the Universe is so harmonious in how it exists that it should be terrifying. But instead — it’s calming. It’s a kind of escapism, of course. Because reality, for us as a biological species, is given to us a bit differently.
N: Why do you think noise has become so popular in Ukraine right now?
ES: Because now it’s not really underground anymore. Ten, twenty, thirty years ago — yes, it was still underground in the post-Soviet space. But not in Berlin, not in New York.
Just think of Jean-Michel Basquiat — everyone knows him as a painter, but he was a musician too, with his project Grey. He was basically making what we’d call noise or experimental sound today. That was back in 1981, in New York.
So today’s noise scene — it’s not some new thing, it’s not marginal anymore. And if it weren’t for the war, I honestly think there’d be at least one experimental sound gig happening every week in every big city in Ukraine.
N: But why now?
ES: First — it’s technically accessible now. You can just go on a marketplace, order whatever you want, connect it to something else, and build a working sound device on your kitchen table.
Second — information. You can find the answer to any question straight from your phone. Fifteen years ago, that wasn’t the case. Twenty — even less so. Back then, no one could have imagined that something you don’t even have could arrive at your doorstep from the other side of the world in two weeks. Now, you want it square? Sure. Liquid? Yes. Paper? Sure. Anything is possible.
And with AI — even if you lack the imagination, it can help you imagine, find the sources.
Experimental sound didn’t just happen by accident. It became popular because now, if you want to do it, you actually can.
Bandcamp New & Notable Mar 15, 2021
N: Reusing discarded stuff — old parts from the trash or flea markets — is a big part of your work and your life. Broken things that you find and bring back to life. Is that a deliberate choice?
ES: It’s simply what you can afford here and now. You have your immediate needs, and then you have what’s realistically possible. I spent years collecting tools, step by step, to build my own “lab”. Some of them really did come from the rubbish, some were just second-hand, others were components from Soviet-era manufacturers that don’t exist anymore.
And with toys — that’s even more interesting. The ones I found ten years ago had chips you could modify. But today — it’s a whole different story. Different algorithms, different chips. Basically, progress is moving towards simplification. And even if you can resolder something, the sound is completely different, often just boring.
So I’m always working within certain limitations, and that shapes my approach: you use what you have, and you make what you can out of it. And over time, as they say, quantity turns into results. I realise it’s a bit amateurish, or at least it started that way, but at the same time it’s hands-on experience I gained on my own.
At the same time, I also managed — you could say — to reach a goal: I created my own label, where I can record sounds onto the microchips I found. Again, my “Cicadas” didn’t end up just as bits of plastic with soldered components — I spent three years shaping their look into what it is now.
Cicada — an instrument as a noise ecosystem
The culmination and key result of Ereh Saw’s creative exploration is the Cicada project. It’s a noise rompler: a device that plays back samples, but does it non-linearly, with the ability to modify the sound in real time. Each Cicada has two control modes: a potentiometer and a photoresistor. One changes the intensity, the other reacts to light, giving the signal a living, shifting modulation.
Inside, you’ll find short electroacoustic compositions by Ukrainian composer Yana Shlyabanska: Flora, War, Birds. But because of the device’s architecture, these pieces always sound different. The idea is that you can never recreate exactly what has already played.
Cicada instruments can be connected to each other. They affect one another through a shared power source — a parameter change in one device instantly transmits to the others. This makes the setup not just instrumental, but networked: each device is like an insect in a noise swarm, and every sound is the result of interaction.
Most of the components for Cicada were found in trash piles, leftovers from Soviet household appliances, flea markets, and boxes where parts from different eras just piled up for years. It’s not just a technical choice, but a principle: working with what’s available and squeezing the maximum out of it — even if those are just fragments.
Sadly, the project was put on hold in 2022 — right at the moment of its first presentation. For the last four years, every hryvnia that should’ve gone into continuing this and other projects has instead gone to Medicine for Ukraine.
These days, from time to time, I still go through the piles of scrap and come across unfinished projects from 2016–17–18. They’re still waiting for me — just like the Cicada project.
This article was written be the team from Neformat. This partnership was created with the support of Music Export Ukraine, the Canada-Ukraine Foundation, and the Aid for Artists Committee.
More about Ereh Saw:
https://www.instagram.com/ereh_saw