Raving Through the War: How Ukraine Tries to Escape — and Resist — Through Techno Sound

There is a recurring image from the early weeks of the Russian full-scale invasion of Ukraine — February 2022, Kyiv under missile fire — that has since become almost mythological in the electronic music world. Partygoers who had gathered the night before the bombs fell for what they did not know would be their last underground party for months. DJs mid-set when the air raid sirens began. A dancefloor that stopped. And then, in the days and weeks that followed, a question that reverberated through every underground scene from Kyiv to Berlin: does music still matter when the ground is shaking?

The answer, as it turns out, was not just yes — it was urgently yes. Ukraine’s techno underground did not disappear under the weight of war. It transformed. It dispersed. It reorganized. And in doing so, it became one of the more unexpected stories of cultural resistance in modern European history — a reminder that the dancefloor, however frivolous it might appear to the uninitiated, has always been a deeply political space.

The Dance Floor as Shelter: Techno Under Air Raid Sirens

To understand what happened to Ukrainian rave culture after February 24, 2022, you have to understand what it was before. Matthew Collin, whose Rave On remains the most comprehensive survey of global electronic dance culture, identifies the underground party as a space of radical social reorganization — a temporary autonomous zone where the hierarchies of daily life dissolve and collective experience takes over. This dynamic is not incidental to war. It is essential to it.

In Kyiv, the techno underground had already been forged under pressure. The Maidan Revolution of 2014, which brought hundreds of thousands into the streets and left over a hundred dead, catalyzed a generation of young Ukrainians who were simultaneously building a new national identity and discovering the liberatory potential of post-Soviet warehouse culture. Clubs like Closer, which opened in 2012 in a former factory in the Podil district, and the nomadic party collective Cxema (Схема, meaning “scheme” or “blueprint”) became the physical architecture of that generation’s self-conception. These were not merely venues. They were — as Hillegonda Rietveld argued for house culture in her foundational This Is Our House — spaces of communal belonging that stood in deliberate opposition to state-sanctioned culture.

When the full-scale invasion began, those spaces were among the first cultural institutions to feel the rupture. Curfews were imposed across Ukrainian cities. Closer shuttered temporarily. The flow of international DJs, a lifeline of creative exchange, stopped overnight. Many artists left — to Warsaw, Berlin, Amsterdam, Prague — carrying the scene’s institutional memory into diaspora. But crucially, they did not abandon it.

Cxema and the Architecture of Resistance

Founded in 2014 by Slava Lepsheev, Cxema had by 2019 grown into one of the most respected underground party series in Eastern Europe — a rotating platform that occupied decommissioned factories, railway infrastructure, and brutalist civic buildings with a curatorial instinct that was unusually sophisticated for a DIY operation. Resident Advisor’s Sasha Raspopina, writing in 2019, described the collective as having transformed Kyiv into “one of Europe’s most vital underground capitals,” a city whose techno scene was defined less by commercial gloss than by an almost architectural seriousness about sound, space, and politics.

After the invasion, Cxema did not dissolve. It relocated — temporarily, partially, defiantly. Parties organized by Cxema or in its spirit began appearing in Berlin, where the Ukrainian diaspora had swelled to several hundred thousand. These were not nostalgic exercises in cultural preservation. They were fundraising operations, solidarity signals, and — critically — a continuation of the original project by other means. The proceeds went to humanitarian and military relief organizations. The politics were not subtext. They were the event.

Luis Manuel Garcia, whose ethnographic work on underground electronic dance music communities explores the way autonomy and intimacy are produced through shared sonic experience, writes that underground scenes create what he calls “quasi-anonymous intimacy” — a bond between strangers that is real without being personalized. In wartime, that bond took on additional weight. On a Cxema dancefloor in Berlin in 2023, among Ukrainians who had fled bombardment and Europeans who had opened their homes to refugees, the anonymity of techno — its refusal of narrative, its insistence on the present tense — became something close to a survival mechanism.

Detroit, Berlin, Kyiv: Three Cities, One Underground Logic

Techno has always carried the memory of cities in crisis. Simon Reynolds, in Energy Flash, traces the genre’s origins in early 1980s Detroit — a post-industrial American city of gutted factories and structural unemployment, where Juan Atkins, Derrick May, and Kevin Saunderson built a music of machine precision and futurist longing out of the ruins of the auto industry. The dancefloor in that context was not escapism. It was, as Reynolds argues, a form of “collective dreaming” — an imaginative rehearsal of a future the city seemed to have been denied.

Berlin’s post-reunification techno story follows an almost identical template. The wall came down in 1989, and within months the city’s abandoned East German infrastructure — power stations, bunkers, railway switching houses — became the raw material for one of the most celebrated underground scenes in history. Tresor, Berghain, Ostgut — these were not just clubs. They were institutions built on ruins, processing collective trauma through bass and repetition.

Kyiv’s techno scene in the 2010s consciously inhabited this lineage. Kai Fikentscher’s observation, in You Better Work, that underground dance music has historically “functioned as a form of resistance against dominant culture” describes the Ukrainian scene’s self-understanding precisely. Post-Maidan Kyiv was a city trying to define itself against both Soviet legacy and Russian cultural domination. The underground rave was, in that context, an assertion of European identity — cosmopolitan, queer-inclusive, aesthetically rigorous — that was itself politically charged.

After 2022, the parallel with Detroit and Berlin became less metaphorical and more literal. Ukraine now had actual ruins. It had actual displacement. And its rave culture was responding to that reality with the same instinct those earlier scenes had shown: by insisting on the body’s right to pleasure, to movement, to collective presence, in the face of forces that sought its destruction.

The Diaspora Rave: Ukrainian Electronic Culture Goes Global

The Ukrainian artists who left after February 2022 were not, for the most part, abandoning their culture. They were exporting it under duress — and in many cases, the export accelerated something that had been building for years.

Nastia, the Kyiv-born DJ who had already built an international reputation through her Nechto label and residencies at clubs across Europe, became one of the most visible figures in this diaspora. Her performances in 2022 and 2023 carried an explicit political charge — a refusal to allow the Ukrainian underground to be erased by association with the Russian electronic scene, which faced its own painful reckoning as venues in Berlin and beyond imposed bans on Russian acts. The distinction mattered. Ukrainian techno was not Russian techno wearing different clothes. It had its own history, its own aesthetics, its own politics.

Other artists — HRTL, Stanislav Tolkachev, the producers and promoters who had built the Kyiv and Kharkiv scenes — continued working, whether from Ukraine or in exile, releasing music that processed the experience of war with varying degrees of directness. Some made records of almost brutal abstraction. Others leaned into the melancholy tonalities of drone and ambient techno. Tim Lawrence, whose Life and Death on the New York Dance Floor charts the way AIDS-era New York club culture became a site of collective mourning and defiant pleasure, provides the most useful framework here: the dancefloor has historically been most politically potent when it refuses the binary between grief and joy, holding both simultaneously in the same sonic space.

Back in Ukraine itself, parties resumed in fits and starts as the war settled into its grinding, sustained phase. Kyiv’s curfew culture shaped the events that became possible: afternoon and early evening raves, parties that had to end before dark, dancefloors improvised in basements that doubled as shelters. The temporality was different. But the music continued.

When the Music Stops: The Cost of Keeping the Scene Alive

None of this is without cost, and to romanticize the wartime rave would be a form of appropriation. A number of figures from the Ukrainian electronic scene have been killed since 2022. Musicians have enlisted. Venues that were the geography of a generation’s coming-of-age have been damaged or destroyed. The question of whether to continue — to party, to dance, to spend money on music when the country is at war — is one that every participant in the Ukrainian underground has had to negotiate privately and collectively.

Matthew Collin, revisiting the global rave story in the updated edition of Rave On, notes that the relationship between underground dance culture and political crisis is never simple — that the same scene can simultaneously produce genuine resistance and serve as a release valve that dissipates energy that might otherwise become organized. The Ukrainian underground is not immune to that tension. Some have argued that the benefit raves, while raising significant funds, also risk aestheticizing a crisis — turning suffering into a brand.

Those critiques deserve to be taken seriously. What they cannot do, however, is erase the human reality of what the dancefloor provides. The body under sustained threat needs somewhere to place itself in time. Music — specifically the kind of repetitive, forward-driving music that techno produces — is one of the oldest technologies for doing exactly that. When Ukrainians in Berlin or Kyiv or Lviv step onto a dancefloor in 2024, they are not denying the war. They are asserting, with their bodies, that the war has not yet taken everything.

That assertion is not nothing. In the calculus of survival, it may be essential.

FAQ: Ukraine’s Techno Underground and the War

What is Cxema and why does it matter to Ukrainian rave culture? Cxema (Схема) is a Kyiv-founded underground party collective established in 2014 by Slava Lepsheev. It became one of Eastern Europe’s most respected underground platforms, staging events in post-industrial and brutalist spaces with an unusually rigorous aesthetic and political identity. After the 2022 invasion, Cxema organized benefit events in European cities, maintaining the scene’s continuity in diaspora while raising funds for Ukrainian humanitarian and military relief.

How did Ukrainian techno artists respond to the Russian invasion? Responses varied widely — from evacuation and continued touring internationally, to enlisting, to organizing solidarity raves, to making music directly addressing the war. Artists like Nastia, Stanislav Tolkachev, and HRTL continued releasing and performing, while the broader scene negotiated whether and how to maintain cultural activity during active conflict.

What is the connection between techno music and political resistance? Techno has historically emerged from cities in crisis — Detroit’s deindustrialization, Berlin’s post-reunification rupture — as a form of collective dreaming and social reorganization outside mainstream channels. Scholars including Simon Reynolds (Energy Flash), Hillegonda Rietveld (This Is Our House), and Luis Manuel Garcia have analyzed how underground dance culture produces autonomous spaces that implicitly or explicitly resist dominant social and political structures.

Are raves still happening in Ukraine during the war? Yes, with significant constraints. Curfew culture in Kyiv and other cities has shaped a new format — afternoon and early evening events, basement and shelter-adjacent venues, parties defined by their temporality. The scene is diminished but not extinguished.

How has the Ukrainian techno scene influenced European club culture? The Ukrainian underground, particularly through Cxema and Kyiv’s Closer club, had already exerted significant influence on European techno culture before 2022 through its aesthetic rigor and its fusion of post-Soviet industrial geography with contemporary sound design. The diaspora acceleration after the invasion has deepened those connections, particularly in Berlin, where Ukrainian electronic culture has had a measurable impact on the city’s underground programming.

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