When the Russian invasion of Ukraine began in 2022, Alex Yatsun was living just 30km from the Russian border in the northernmost part of Kharkiv. “When I woke up that day I started living in a completely different reality,” he recalls. “There were bombs falling every hour.”-
Yatsun’s family evacuated but he soon returned north to more dangerous territory to volunteer at a medical centre. “But my house was hit by shelling,” he recalls. A photograph on his Instagram shows the aftermath: huge chunks of wall blown out, smashed windows, a mangled front door. “That was the moment I decided to move closer to central Ukraine.”
Despite the difficult and often harrowing backdrop of the last year, the 24-year-old has managed to produce a new 21-track compilation album as DJ Sacred, entitled Dungeon Rap: the Evolution. It’s a follow-up to 2019’s, Dungeon Rap: the Introduction.
Dungeon rap is a new hybrid style of hip-hop created by Yatsun. It merges Memphis rap – a style of lo-fi atmospheric southern hip-hop made popular by the likes of Three Six Mafia in the late 80s and early 90s – and dungeon synth, a sub-genre that blossomed in 1990s Scandinavia blending dark ambient and black metal.
Yatsun’s compilations feature a variety of his musical aliases, such as DJ Bishop, DJ Armok and Pillbox. While other artists also feature as guests, this approach allowed him a variety of musical personalities to explore while presenting the image of a more engaged and thriving scene around the infant genre. “I came to the conclusion it would be very difficult to develop a whole new genre of music only by using one name,” he says. “I thought I could reinvent the process by having these different approaches. DJ Armok is more reliant on bass and more heavily connected to Memphis rap, whereas Pillbox is more about the ethereal and transcendental – like a sublime melancholic feeling.”
The result is moody and atmospheric stuff. Synths hum doomily, lo-fi beats crackle and snap, while sampled vocals are often slowed to a woozy drawl, blending in as texture rather than leading the charge. Yatsun became so obsessed with Memphis rap, and its “evil” sound, that he spent months breaking down hundreds of tracks, collecting their beats, vocals, melodies and synth lines. He’s assembled them in mega packs, containing thousands of samples, that can be used as the basis for other people to make their own mutated twist on the genre.
There is also a feeling of inescapable darkness to the music. Elements of dread hover like ominous clouds about to unleash a storm – but the storm itself never comes. “The whole idea of this music is the end of times,” Yatsun says. “It corresponds to my life and my beliefs that the future is bleak.” Yatsun also cites the late theorist and music critic Mark Fisher, and his writings on hauntology, as being linked to the work. “It relates to the idea of a lost future,” he says. “Since the 2013 uprising, most of my life I’ve been living in a condition without stability or any clear vision of a future. I can’t predict my future because I don’t even believe in the idea of one, because right now it’s being cancelled. Through this music I have nostalgia for times I have never experienced. It’s completely out of reality – more like a fantasy.”
Yatsun’s approach to creating a new genre out of thin air seemingly worked. There are now dungeon rap artists and labels popping up in other countries like Finland, Germany and the UK. Some of these new artists embracing the genre – like DJ Gravelord, Dominus Soul and Lord Crucifix – feature as guests on the latest compilation. Yatsun suggests that the themes of alienation and a sense of being trapped in a futureless existence are resonating. “It’s not something that is just localised in Ukraine,” he says. “It’s something we are all experiencing, especially the younger generation. It’s now much clearer that what we were promised, in terms of neoliberalism and a better life and future, has all started to decay. We are all feeling this.”
There’s perhaps also an element of relating to a deeper darkness at the core of the music that is as universally personal as it is political. “If you look at my most popular tracks, most of them were written during very difficult times for me,” Yatsun says. “I often have strong, negative emotions in myself and I’m trying to battle through them by making art. Hence why my music is pretty depressing sometimes.”
However, what was pretty much an isolated incident of a teenager experimenting with different sounds to create a new hybrid genre has steadily bloomed into a connected network that now spans continents. “Dungeon rap is my brainchild,” he says. “The Introduction release was like looking at my child taking its first steps. For this one, it’s like looking at my child growing up and learning to speak.”