Photo: Heinali Live at St. Sophia in Kyiv by Alina Garmash and Vitaliy Mariash.
Oleh Shpudeiko, who performs under the moniker Heinali, is a composer and sound artist whose recent practice is driven by the sonic reterritorialisation of the past. Treating history not as a static archive but as a ‘distant mirror’, he extracts historical acoustic phenomena, compositional techniques, and sacred traditions from their original contexts, forcing them into contemporary frameworks. By doing so, his work serves as a mechanism to expose the contradictions of our time.
While his preferred instrument is a modular synthesiser, which he utilises as a site of independent artistic research to improvise both monophony and polyphony, his methodology transcends any single tool, encompassing a broader prism of electro-acoustic instrumentation and composition.
Born in Kyiv in 1985, Shpudeiko is self-taught. Unbound by formal academic musical training, he developed an independent, autodidactic approach to composition and improvisation. His early output in the 2000s was stylistically eclectic, spanning ambient releases, modern classical compositions, and collaborations with US poet Matt Finney in the Southern Gothic style. Over time, an independent study of Early Music music, particularly early polyphony, gradually captured his focus entirely. This deep historical immersion crystallised and gained significant international recognition with his 2020 album, Madrigals. The album fused period-instrument improvisation with generative polyphony. It was named ‘Contemporary Album of the Month’ by The Guardian and was shortlisted for both the Shevchenko National Prize and the Aprize Music Award, establishing his unique methodology of integrating Early Western music into contemporary electronic spaces.
As his conceptual framework deepened, so did his engagement with institutional and architectural spaces. In 2023, MoMA Magazine premiered Aves rubrae, a work commissioned by the Museum of Modern Art in New York that bridged Gothic Notre Dame polyphony with the rogue spiritualism of Coil. That same year, following the full-scale invasion of Ukraine, Shpudeiko released Kyiv Eternal. Described by The New York Times as ‘a ravishing audioscape’, the album is a hauntological tribute to his besieged home city, layering pre-war field recordings with ambient ‘memory loops’ from his private archives as a farewell to the future violently taken away. It was named among the year’s best albums by A Closer Listen and Mixmag Ukraine.
This trajectory culminated in the 2024 premiere of Гільдеґарда (‘Hildegard’). A subversive recontextualisation of the 12th-century abbess Hildegard von Bingen, the project reinterprets her music drawing on traditional ‘authentic’ Ukrainian traditional singing as artistic material rather than romanticised folklore, negotiating a complex sense of identity amidst displacement. In collaboration with vocalist Andriana-Yaroslava Saienko, Shpudeiko unearthes the potential ‘raw viscerality’ of Hildegard’s visions and music, reterritorialising them into a contemporary, derealised body experiencing war. Hailed by Philip Sherburne as ‘the most astonishingly gorgeous show’ at its Unsound Festival premiere, the subsequent studio album earned an 8/10 from Pitchfork—which praised it as ‘a chilling meditation on wartime trauma and the endurance of faith’—and featured prominently in ‘Best of 2025’ lists across The Quietus, Pitchfork, MINT, Crack Magazine, Stereogum, Cyclic Defrost, Futurism Restated, Foxy Digitalis, The Honest Broker and Bandcamp.
Beyond his studio and live electronic practice, Shpudeiko’s output extends into film and game scores, interdisciplinary collaboration and kinetic sound. He composed the award-winning original score for the video game Bound (Sony Santa Monica / Plastic) and co-founded SynthTap, a kinetic performance project fusing modular synthesis with tap dance alongside choreographer Volodymyr Shpudeiko. His explorations of spatial acoustics and sound art, created in partnership with classically trained composer Alexey Shmurak, are held in the permanent collections of the National Art Museum of Ukraine (NAMU) and the Museum of Modern Art of Odesa (MSIO). Together, the duo also hosted АШОШ, an educational podcast aimed at bridging the gap between academic and amateur musical discourse.
Extending his commitment to fostering musical dialogue and artistic development, Shpudeiko was appointed as a Mentor for the 2026–2027 edition of the Berlin-based Forecast Platform. In this role, he guides emerging international practitioners in the conceptualisation and realisation of their own sound-based projects.
Heinali's works have been released by Unsound, Injazero, Sony Interactive Entertainment, The Flenser, and Opal Tapes, among others. He maintains a rigorous international touring schedule, performing at international festivals and venues worldwide, with selected appearances at Lincoln Center (New York), Le Guess Who? (Utrecht), CTM (Berlin), Rewire (The Hague), WOS Festival (Santiago de Compostela), Muziekgebouw (Amsterdam), Musikprotokoll (Graz), Next (Bratislava), Tremor (Ponta Delgada), Kiezsalon (Berlin), Primavera Sound (Barcelona), Fiber (Amsterdam), and Unsound (Krakow and Adelaide)
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