Kyiv’s Strichka Festival announces tenth anniversary line-up

Kyiv’s Strichka Festival has unveiled the line-up for its tenth-anniversary edition. 

The Ukrainian festival will take place at Strincka Factory on 18th and 19th May. The weekend event will see performances from the likes of Ben Frost, Enrica Falqui, Charlotte Bendiks, Marie K, Foa Hoka, and more. 

The theme for the upcoming edition will be “fragments”, and marks the second time the festival has been held during Russia’s war on Ukraine. The festival returned last year for the first time since 2021, featuring artists such as John Dimas, Afriqua, Borys, and Bambu.

Organisers have framed the theme of this year’s festival as follows: “In our memories, this festival, like our whole life, has turned into one happy dream, in which many smiling ghosts of the past have settled. We decided to gather them all together and tear them to fragments – without pain, but only with gratitude – and organise the next Strichka, which will be new in some ways, because times have changed, but still cozy. And from those fragments to make strange stickers, prints for a new series of T-shirts and the entire visual campaign to be sure to let it go: it will never be the same again”

Last year’s edition of Strichka Festival took place at Closer, a key club in the Ukrainian capital. Following a fire that broke out in March 2023, the venue organised a series of Sunday parties to raise funds for repairs. Revisit Kit Macdonald’s report on the 2023 edition of the Strichka Festival here.

You can read DJ Mag’s longread on the fight to preserve Ukraine’s electronic music culture in a time of war here.