At Kyiv’s Strichka Festival, ravers dance in defiance

Instead of running non-stop from Saturday evening into Monday morning as previous editions have, Strichka 2023 has to work around a midnight-to-5AM wartime curfew, meaning two separate days of programming running from the morning until around 10.30PM. Employing typical Ukrainian understatement, Serhij Vel, one of Closer’s directors and co-owners, tells DJ Mag about the challenge of organising this particular Strichka. “It was a bit more difficult than usual. We don’t have the full team here just now, and for me the nightly shelling of Kyiv has made for a not-quite-stable mental state. Convincing foreign artists to come was also difficult, but we really appreciate the support of the ones who did.”

The handful of foreign artists who do make it are clearly enchanted by what they find. “As artists this has to be why we do it,” the American DJ/producer Adam Parker, AKA Afriqua, tells DJ Mag right after playing a rapturously received set on the Closer stage. “When they asked I was very quickly like, ‘I can’t imagine a situation in which I don’t do this’. This is the club at its most necessary, it means 10 times more in a situation like this.”

Thanks to the pandemic and then the full-scale invasion, this is the first edition of Strichka in its intended form since 2019, an online version and an in-person autumn edition having been staged in 2021. If there was no possibility of Strichka going ahead in 2022, then it seems there was no possibility of it not going ahead in 2023. “We understood early on that we had to do it,” Sasha Shults, a member of the Closer team who plays the festival’s second day, tells DJ Mag later. “A lot of military guys called us and said they wanted to come to Strichka for the one short holiday they’ll have in six months.”