Discography + Life Context

For as long as I can remember, I have thought of myself as an Earthling. I did not see borders between countries, and I was genuinely surprised that people could not move freely around their own planet. So I grew up believing that all people are equal, that we are all neighbours on one planet. But from early childhood I faced hardships that made me feel all the pain people can cause each other. Now, when I look at photos of myself as a child, I feel a strong urge to save that boy and protect him from the traumas and injustices ahead.

In front of you is a little boy, born in winter in the harsh Arctic, far from civilisation, born by the will of fate in a modern colony of the russian empire. He is a descendant of undocumented migrants from korea and of an Indigenous people of the Arctic, the children of nature, as they call themselves. This little boy does not yet know what he will have to go through before he can come back to himself and learn to love himself. For now he watches, full of hope, trust and love, which he will lose along the way…

For as long as I can remember, I dreamt of performing on stage with a microphone in my hand. The very first song I sang in front of other people was in russian, even though I did not understand a word of what I was singing. It came from the old russian propaganda cartoon “Cheburashka”. I have to say that despite the communist propaganda in the cartoon, the song itself is very pure and bright in a childlike way, if a little sad. But since my first language was Sakha, I did not understand the meaning of the words, although I understood the meaning I picked up from the pictures in the cartoons.

Once, on a trip from my small Arctic hometown of Nyurba to the village of Sulya, I saw a tape recorder for the first time. My cousin had brought his cool portable recorder there, and he was recording everyone. I must have been only three or four. My family asked me to sing a song next to this device, and I did not know it was recording. I was very nervous about having to sing. I sang, and then my cousin played back the recording. That was the first time I heard my singing from the outside, the first time I heard my own voice. I think I liked the recording. But everyone around me burst out laughing. It turned out that one word sounded funny: without noticing, I had changed the letter “p” to a “b”. My family laughed, but it ended with me becoming deeply shy of my voice and my pronunciation. As a child you do not understand that this is harmless, so your body tightens and stores it in its memory. Later this turned into years of being too shy to sing at full voice. Now, of course, I would find it sweet to listen to that recording. Sadly, it has not survived.

After that first recording in my life, I always dreamt of recording again, but doing it properly this time, without any mistakes, so that nobody could laugh at me. Watching singers on television holding a microphone, I dreamt that one day I would also walk out on stage and sing. All of this was happening in an unsafe and frightening home, where my mum, who had no home of her own, was trying to build a personal life in someone else’s house, and where adult relatives could turn up drunk at any moment and threaten all of us. Where my father could come and break the windows and doors and then beat my mum in front of me. It was all terrifying. But despite this, little Ayal tried to believe that all of it was wrong, that it was not normal to threaten people or to hit people. It seemed to me that if rules and laws exist, then everyone has to follow them. Even so, I remember using the handle of a skipping rope as a microphone and pretending to sing when nobody was at home. But I tried to keep this dream a secret, because I was afraid of being judged by adults and other children, who would surely have found my wish too girly for a boy. Adults already mistook me for a girl when I was little, and I was told off for it, although I did nothing to provoke anyone. In fact, my friends were always girls. They understood me and supported me all through childhood, and to this day my closest friends are women. I did not avoid boys on purpose, but my close friends were only girls, even though I had two neighbour friends I walked to school with in any weather, whether it was minus 47 in winter or plus 32 in early summer.

I began to cherish my dream of becoming a singer. I imagined in detail how I would look on stage and how my voice would sound there. I started listening to music, at first very old songs in russian on vinyl records. Even here you can see the colonial policy: a child had no chance to hear songs in the native language of an Indigenous people of the Arctic, or in other languages of the world. But as a child you take everything as natural. I listened to every record we had. Even then the songs seemed very primitive to me, but I loved listening to recordings of russian fairy tales, although propaganda controlled the meaning and almost every word there too. Then, as I got a bit older, I moved on to the artists who were “modern” at the time and appeared on state channels. The choice was small, and I listened to russian pop singers. There was no internet in my small Arctic town back then, so everything came from television and radio, which of course were controlled by the colonial authorities. Songs in Sakha were hard to find. There were songbooks with lyrics, but without any notes. Programmes in Sakha were on television at awkward times and only a few times a week; the rest of the time there were only russian channels. Today the Sakha Republic has a state channel that broadcasts in Sakha and russian, but of course it is all propaganda commissioned by the local and federal authorities.

In those same years my mum enrolled me in music school. They gave me an audition and asked me to sing. After the audition the head of the school told me to go to the violin class, although I really wanted to learn the piano. But who listens to a child in a collectivist colonial culture, especially back then. I started learning the violin with a remarkably sensitive and supportive teacher from ukraine. She often praised me, and that gave me faith. But a year later she went back to her homeland and the violin class closed. So I was put into the russian domra class, with the words “it has strings too”. Although the young teacher was kind, the sound of that instrument hurt my ears; after the violin it felt rough and far too loud. I think I studied there for three years. I left the music school because of bullying by older pupils who waited for me after lessons to beat me up. I kept running away from them, until one day I was simply tired of it, and I asked my mum to call the school and say I was very busy preparing for maths. It was not true, but for a boy it was shameful to complain that he was being bullied.

From about the age of twelve I started building miniature concert stages, with lights and toys in place of the performers. Around the same time I started listening to songs in English, but they were dance tracks, so they did not really grab me, although I loved the sound. Then I finally heard My All by Mariah Carey for the first time. It was the moment something turned over in my child’s head. After years of songs with the strict, simple singing of russian performers, Mariah Carey’s voice seemed otherworldly to me. I saw her as a sorceress with an utterly unreal voice and melismas. Her vocal control was so mesmerising and inspiring that I played that song on cassette 30 or 40 times a day, which of course my mum did not understand. And I had no headphones. Her voice gave me completely new sensations and took me into a world that did not exist around me. Later I realised it was the only place where I could escape from everything dangerous in my life into a boundless space of freedom and inspiration, where nobody could threaten me and I did not have to feel fear and helplessness. Her singing did not move anyone around me. I was probably her only fan in my small town. I had just one of her songs, and I did not understand the words, but it was that song that helped me keep my faith in miracles and in justice.

When I became a teenager, I noticed that my hair was starting to turn grey, and for the first time in my life I began dyeing it. Later I would develop a strong allergy to the dye, but that is another story. In this period my father’s drunken visits suddenly stopped, and life became a little calmer. But my classmates had entered the age of first crushes, boys on girls and girls on boys. For me the subject of romance was buried very deep, out of fear that my sexuality would be exposed, which of course is not accepted in monocultural patriarchal societies like the Sakha one. Showy masculinity was always welcomed: wanting to kill ducks and animals, an interest in guns and traditional hunting. All of this was so unacceptable to me from childhood that the people around me saw me as something wrong and unacceptable. So I kept quiet and put my energy into creative things, like writing articles for the children’s section of the local newspaper, and leadership at school. My korean grandfather was very pleased about this, by the way, because he was a local journalist and a well known gardener, the first person to grow a watermelon in the Arctic. Honestly, I felt shy and embarrassed when people said that my grandfather was not Sakha but korean, and I tried in every way to deny it, because not being Sakha was considered shameful. My grandfather was a passionate gardener and had no really close friends. He was left an orphan after his parents, undocumented migrants, died soon after arriving in the Sakha Republic. When he was two or three, another family took him in, but they used him as a slave, so he ran away from them at eleven.

At school, as usual at that age, the boys talked about the girls and the girls talked about the boys. I tried to avoid these conversations, because I understood that my sexuality would cause me problems. My classmates were good to me, but only because they did not know. If they had found out, I would have become an outcast like the other boys the whole school humiliated for being gay. Once, one of my classmates (a future manager at a tobacco corporation) laughed at me in front of the whole class, saying a phrase she thought was very funny and fitted me perfectly: “a stranger among his own, his own among strangers”. Everyone took it as a joke, but for me it was a trauma, because I understood that I had been singled out for my gender and sexuality and laughed at in public. So I hid any thoughts about sexuality even deeper inside, dismissed them, and threw myself into studying and social activities.

In the middle of all this inner hell, my aunt suddenly brought me a cassette of new English songs from the capital of the colonial state. I was over the moon. I ran to collect the cassette along a road you could hardly call a road, covered in a sludge of mud and clay. I remember opening the cassette very carefully and searching for the name Mariah Carey. And there it was, next to a singer I did not know yet, Whitney Houston, and the title of the song: When You Believe. The only words I understood were “you believe”, and I thought it was a song about believing in the light. I fell in love with it from the first notes. I played it again and again, afraid at the same time of wearing out the tape. God, how their voices blended. To this day I think of that recording as a masterpiece of the music industry. It was a turning point in how I understood the voice and music. Even though I was not singing or practising at full voice, I repeated every phrase, every riff and run. It was a firework of emotions. That was when I became sure that music and singing were mine. It is simply a perfect recording. Around then the first signs of the internet appeared in my small town. I had no computer of my own, so I used the school computer to look for information about Mariah and Whitney. I remember one page took seven minutes to open, and that is how I found out they had performed at the OSCARS. Only years later would I be able to watch that performance on YouTube. Then I found out about the GRAMMYS. It turned out that one russian state channel did broadcast the Grammys, but very late at night. My mum did not let me watch television at night, so I asked her almost every day in advance to let me watch the Grammy ceremony.
I remember that night in 2000 as if it were yesterday. I am sitting up at night, watching television with the sound very low. On the screen people are celebrating and hugging, and it seemed to me like another world, on another planet. Britney Spears performs, and then Whitney Houston appears at a table in a hat, and then a second song with a staircase. It was an incredible show. The artists seemed unreally happy and free to me, the opposite of my own life, where I had to be serious, anticipate danger and always look over my shoulder, because back then it was normal to be attacked by thugs in the street. I could not find that kind of freedom in myself, but music let me feel it physically.

After that I started to act, and in one of the villages I found a musician called Yuri who could help me with arrangements. I decided to make a cover of I Will Always Love You. It was very bold, of course. But I could not do it any other way. There, in a remote village, with the temperature outside below minus 40, I heard for the first time how he played freely on his electronic keyboard and worked out the chords for the song. It was a magical experience. With the backing track ready, I went home and started rehearsing very quietly, shy of my own voice. Still unprepared, I went to the local arts centre, where a sound engineer worked who could record me. It was my first experience of a professional recording on a proper microphone. It was so exciting and meant so much to me that I could not sleep afterwards. After the recording he told me: you do these “little tricks” well when you sing, but there are too many of them, and you should sing ethnic songs, because nobody needs foreign music. Of course that hurt me inside. I was not interested in ethnic music; it simply did not draw me in as much as the world of songs that gave me freedom and so many emotions. That original recording has not survived, but I found this one, which is also one of my early recordings.

Then I decided to make another cover, in Sakha, of a russian language song (I do not remember its name). The melody and the song were completely forgettable. But I chose it to try to get closer to the ethnic songs of my people. I went back to Yuri in the remote village to make the cover. I think it was done in two hours.

And at last I decided to take the first step: to sing this song at my school leavers’ party. None of my classmates knew that I sang or that I was preparing a number. And then, the day before the party, I told them I would sing at the end.

Sadly, I have not found a recording of that performance.

After school I knew for sure that I wanted to give my life to music. But my mum did not support the idea. So I obediently applied to the faculties of physics, engineering and construction. I do not remember exactly. Anyway, I got in, but I turned it down and applied for psychology instead, and thanks to my maths I got in there easily too. That is how I moved to the central part of the russian colonial state. As a student I practically gave up music, apart from one attempt to sing a cover at a student concert, and that performance was a failure.

After finishing university and returning to the Arctic, I decided to come back to music. I released the first song I had written as a student, “Creative Life”. To me it sounds very naive and vulnerable. You can hear in it that I am still trying to fit the invisible cultural expectations. I entered a local competition with this song and failed spectacularly. At the end of the song I used an effect that was very popular at the time, inspired by CHER’s “Believe”.

Creative Life (First Single)

But my lack of confidence as a singer is very strong. Hahaha. How embarrassing. At that time I often listened to Christina Aguilera, and I wrote the song “You And I”. Honestly? I feel terribly awkward listening to it. It is an awful song with awful singing, but it was an attempt to prove, above all to myself, that I have a voice and that it can be heard. And despite the awkwardness I will share it. I feel uncomfortable and even ashamed of this song, but it is part of my past, part of me. I did not listen to the musician I made it with. He tactfully tried to tell me that the song had problems with rhythm and structure, but I did not want to listen to anyone. For the first time I wanted to make a song the way I felt it. This is the first of my early recordings that has survived.

You And I

Even though the song is very raw and frankly just bad, it took me to the semi-final of the pop music competition “New Wave”. I sent this song there together with a cover of “Unchained Melody”.

When I asked for advice about going to this competition, one of the local producers told me straight: you are not worthy of representing our republic, you should not go, she should. And he named a singer who was more worthy than me. Of course that was unpleasant to hear. Later he would do a lot more harm behind the scenes. In the end I simply applied on my own and went straight to the semi-final, skipping the regional rounds.

In the end I went with a whole team, led by a woman director who chose how I should dress and how I should dance. By the way, this director would later become the head of the Theatre that fired me for my public position and my criticism of the authorities. I was too naive and trusting, so I agreed to everything. My mum supported me a lot back then and took out a loan without telling me, just so that I could go. In that culture everything depends on state officials and their wishes. There are no independent patrons or sponsors, and if you are not a media personality, finding a sponsor is practically impossible. Any significant event is held with the support of state organisations, and it is presented as the personal support of certain high ranking officials, although it is paid for with people’s taxes. I had the promise of one state manager in the arts department that all my costs would be refunded after I came back from the competition. Even the fact that a non-russian citizen of the country had reached the semi-final of a nationwide competition was unreal. Only later did I learn that many artists applied every year and were not even allowed into the regional selection.

It was a huge failure. For one thing, I had never sung on a big stage before. They gave me a look with real fur and other ethnic elements, which did not suit me as a vegan and simply did not suit my style. I listened to the professionals, whom I believed knew what they were doing. I did not think that visual style is also a language that carries a message. And that message was not mine. It was foreign and went against my inner nature. I was always looking for a universal language that everyone could understand, whatever their culture or country. I believed in that universal language; how else could I explain being so moved and inspired by Mariah Carey’s singing without even understanding the words? I felt terrible in that look, but I ignored my feelings, probably because I had been used to ignoring myself since childhood. In the capital of the colonial state people looked at me like an animal in a zoo. When I came back, nobody refunded anything. The state manager just carelessly said: “but you didn’t win”.

But I carried on… I kept writing songs for other people, and they won competitions. But I wrote for others completely for free, and yes, that was basically normal for me. In general I found it uncomfortable to ask for money for my work.

While carrying on with music, I was surviving however I could, working as a psychologist and as a specialist at an arts centre. Later I opened a school for performers. Some of my students are still creating today. With some of them I am still friends, despite the distance and the years.

I created projects and organised concerts, evenings, charity concerts to raise money for a cancer hospital and to build a place of traditional Sakha belief on the grounds of a prison, and ecological projects to clear a huge illegal rubbish dump and study the effect of the waste on the nearby lake and ecosystem. Those were years full of projects, as if I was trying to keep myself busy just to escape from what was troubling me and making me feel vulnerable and weak. But I did several big eco projects, and later I paid for them by losing the chance to sing and to speak freely.

Working in a crisis psychological support service, I was in effect running the service. I rebuilt the support protocols there and did everything I could to make the psychologists’ work comfortable. I made sure that calls to our service were free from anywhere in the republic; before that, only residents of the capital of the Arctic republic could call. In the end, as often happens there, another russian man with no relevant education or experience was officially appointed as head, and I was told it was just a formality, that nothing would change and that I should carry on doing everything as before. It was unfair, so I simply decided to walk away into nowhere…

I found enthusiasts who wanted to help me make live recordings of covers in English. The idea was that the voice would be left unprocessed, just as it was. Today I value this a lot, because I can hear how I used to sing.

Then came years of searching for my voice and my style. I would say that in that period I was trying to please the audience and to become one of my own people, which in the end did not work.

This song is not like me, but it captures exactly how I was at the time: pushy, cheeky, wanting to prove to everyone that I was cool. Hahaha.

I’m Getting Into Your Life (Album “Unusual Art”)

And this one is an old song of an Arctic people, and it is very popular. I was very tense because I wanted so much to add lots of embellishments and do it a little differently. But it seemed to me that this version was the most I could do at the time. Colleagues and listeners criticised me for this version, saying I had distorted a sacred song. But most importantly, Marina Popova, the first singer of this song, praised me for giving it a new breath. By the way, a well known “liberal” politician of the russian colonial state once said about her, “Well, the monkey sings nicely”, and nobody defended her or condemned him for those words.

The Snow Bird. (Single)

In a private conversation with the first former president of the Sakha Republic, when I remarked that there were no presenters or public figures from the national republics on the federal state channels, he replied: “If you were from another country, it would be easier for you to break through to the federal level, but as it is, they won’t let anyone capable in there who isn’t russian.” This did not surprise me; it was obvious anyway. But I was not ready to accept the injustice.

But then came losses. The next song is dedicated to my beloved aunt, who was my angel. She looked after my health; she was a doctor in the emergency ambulance service. I wrote this song on a plane. I took a sheet of paper and started writing the words, and the melody came by itself, while the tears just kept flowing. The passengers were looking at me and were probably worried. That is how I was able to cry out my grief. But it happened that, as this song came out, I lost my second beloved aunt. I should say that in Arctic culture the bond between children and their aunts is very important and strong; aunts are often as close as a mother or a grandmother.

The Last Time When I Met you (Album “Unusual Art”)

As I grew my presence on social media and travelled to different districts, I kept running into my own people calling me “Omuk”, which means “outsider”. As a student I had got used to russian racism, even to being beaten up for racist reasons. There, racism and contempt for non-russian citizens really are the norm, and sadly it remains an invisible problem for most russians. At the same time, as a student I found close friends I could talk to about anything, who supported me and bought me food when I could not go out after nazis had beaten me up, having followed me into a shop. But I did not expect that on returning to the Arctic I would face the same rejection, simply because of my mixed ethnicity. I sang the national anthem of the Arctic Sakha Republic, probably hoping to prove that I belonged.

National Anthem of Sakha Republic

In those years I also had my first relationship with a man. They were very intense years. But although the relationship lasted quite a long time, it was abusive and traumatic for me. Even so, I am grateful for the experience, though that understanding did not come straight away. Over those years his relatives became almost like family to me, and I never stopped talking to them. Years later my ex’s cousin would name her child after me.

Two Hearts (Album “Unusual Art”)

During the relationship I worked on this song very meticulously, and there were many versions. I just could not settle on one. But I had to choose.

I’m Singing For The Tomorrow (Album “Unusual Art”)

After the break-up I made a few attempts to build new relationships, but as soon as I saw the first signs of control and abuse, I ended them. In the end I decided to stop looking for a relationship and to be free and safe. That is how I unlearnt how to trust men. In those years I also faced harassment and violence at professional events and meetings. But at the time I did not take it seriously and did not think about the consequences, which would come back to me years later and which I am still working through today.

I wrote this song when I felt deeply lonely while surrounded by people who did not see it, because I tried as hard as I could not to show it.

Just Love Me Please (Album “Unusual Art”)

Suddenly, one summer day, two little girls aged three and four, Alina and Aiyana, went missing in a village in the Sakha Republic. I learnt about it from the news and did not even think that one of them was my niece. Then my aunt called me and asked me to help with the search. I immediately switched all my attention to it. We brought in every resource we had. Volunteers gathered quickly, but some of them could not even get there because of the difficult logistics.

During the search I received a message from someone I did not know, clearly connected to the state, insistently asking me to delete my post calling for help with the search. I refused. In such an emergency I could not even get my head around their logic. The next day my post, which had a lot of views and comments, was somehow deleted. Even then everything was under control, but I did not notice, because I was busy searching.

In the tent camp where I slept, someone left a book in Japanese next to my tent. The same day an official invited me for a talk and, in the guise of an ordinary conversation, asked me with that book in his hands whether I worked for japanese intelligence. And this was happening in the middle of the search for my niece, in the taiga, among crowds of volunteers. I thought it was a joke or something surreal. Instead of looking into and working through other criminal and other possibilities, they were spending time looking for possible traitors to the system.

I should mention that many Koreans in the soviet union were accused of spying for japan, and this led to the mass forced deportation of thousands of Koreans from the Far East to the countries of Central Asia; many did not survive the journey. Now, looking back, I understand how much this system was and still is under control, how every person is examined under a magnifying glass as a potential traitor to the state. In the end, more than three months of active searching led nowhere. Helicopters, rescuers, investigators. Nothing. Still nothing. It is an open wound for our whole family to this day.

The Angels

At that time the russian colonial state seized Crimea. I firmly condemned it and told the people around me that this was colonial policy, and that even the Indigenous peoples would pay for the consequences of the annexation of Crimea. I remember talking to a woman who worked at the hostel where we stayed with the mother of my missing niece. She told me how within a few hours all the hotels, children’s camps and dormitories filled up with young men in civilian clothes. She said the russian state was seizing Crimea. We watched the news together and talked all night about the inhumane policy of the authorities. Our trip, made in the hope of finding more help with the search for the girls, came to nothing.

I simply felt empty on every front. It seemed I had no resources for anything. Kind people, close colleagues and friends all tried to support me. I closed the school, because I just could not carry on.

I saw with my own eyes that the laws do not work, that the rescuers do not have enough equipment and are not well enough trained. I saw the root problems behind all of it, coming from the colonial policy of the kremlin, which shapes local officials who can never have enough and steal every resource from the people.

People started writing to me about what worried them. I began writing about social problems, from the employment system to hunting for fun, which is the norm among the Indigenous people.

Hoping to bring something new into my life, I moved from the colonised Arctic republic to the east of the country, and then to the capital of the colonial empire. There I worked as a vocal coach, and there I discovered ways of working with the voice in teaching singing that would later become a practical method of voice work, used by teachers across the country. In Moscow I completed a Master’s degree at a music academy. From time to time I went back to the Arctic and sang.

Far away from my home river, I wrote this song in a few minutes, and a couple of days later an ecological disaster happened that changed forever the lives of thousands of Indigenous people living along the Vilyuy river. Nothing has changed to this day.

Save The Nature (Album “Unusual Art”)

I started a petition and got in touch with ecologists. A long fight for the truth began. We carried out independent tests of water samples, and the local laboratory immediately contradicted us by falsifying the samples. People did not believe them. I created a petition demanding that the mining company take responsibility for polluting the river. But only a couple of months later did the main media in the republic start talking about it, after I, torn apart by the injustice, had called them personally and demanded moral responsibility. Then, out of nowhere, “state” ecologists appeared who claimed that it was they who had independently disproved the state laboratories’ results. In the end they managed to take our place and call themselves by our name. Later they went quiet after receiving state funding for their projects. Before this I had also done several eco projects. Here is a documentary film about pollution in the Arctic.

At the same time I was trying to return to the republic as a soloist at the theatre, but I was told there was no place for me. With persistence and my knowledge of the autocratic system, I pushed the theatre management into finding me a place. In the end I came, but formally they had found me a place that they could take away at any moment, because it belonged to another singer on maternity leave. That basically suited me. I just wanted to do a few projects with old Yakut songs, and I would manage to make only one of them there.

At the same time I was writing articles and publishing interviews with people who had faced the injustice of the system. I got a lot of hate for uncomfortable truths, but I carried on anyway.

Album “The Spring”

My Dear

A Person's Motherland

Love

Childhood

The Stars

The Flower in the Morning

My Dream At The Night

The Snow Bird

All my initiatives were shut down, and there was open bullying. Even though I had no conflict with anyone, most of the artists turned against me and called me a “revolutionary”, although they themselves could not explain why they saw me as a troublemaker. At the time I could not defend myself; I was simply trying to keep the chance to sing in my first language. In the end they fired me over the phone just before Christmas. Later I found out that the soloist on maternity leave had written a statement saying she was coming back to work, but she never actually did. I was provoked at the theatre many times: they shouted at me, took the speakers away before a concert during rehearsals, did not let me play an instrument, and I had to ask for everything in writing. Of course, this was a way of keeping me under control, so that I would not write articles the authorities did not like or stir up society with my critical thoughts. But I kept writing, and wrote a lot, publishing articles about young performers. Later that independent portal was closed, and all the material was deleted from the site because of the censorship laws passed in the russian colonial state in 2022.

And it worked. I broke. For a while I still tried to stay in the Arctic and opened a studio again. An independent russian businesswoman supported me a lot, practically letting me rent the studio at a non-commercial price. We talked a lot about social problems and supported each other, understanding where everything was heading.

But I was betrayed many times in that period, and it hurt most from two people I had thought of as friends. One of them used her position of power and lied to me, saying she was inviting me to take part in a charity event for peace and kindness. Later I found out it was a disgusting propaganda event. As if I sensed the trap, I asked several times what kind of event it was. But in the end I trusted her, agreed and went. She simply used my trust. In private conversations she always said she did not like the government and thought it was wrong. But as it turned out, these were only tricks, or plain foolishness. Almost straight away, another friend and colleague with whom I had opened the studio left because I asked her to clear up her own rubbish. Just a trifle, an ordinary thing. But she left in a demonstrative way, leaving me alone with the financial obligations to the landlord. It was hard psychologically above all; nobody wanted to have anything to do with me. TV managers openly said they could not invite me on air because my name was not approved higher up. Burning inside from the injustice, after leaving the country I would publish a series of angry posts about what had happened there: who had persecuted me, who had built an image of a moral ideal while deceiving everyone, and who had used their position to humiliate me and trample on me.

What follows are facts about victims of violence. If you are sensitive, please skip the next paragraph.

Victims of well known local public figures (artists, performers, politicians) wrote to me. All their stories were confirmed. I began publishing interviews with victims on my Instagram profile: two victims of a famous figure in the entertainment world, who raped them and caused physical injuries, leaving one of them disabled while the other still suffers physical symptoms. They were amazed that people ignored the truth and still went to this person’s events and supported the abuser. The media ignored it, there was no outcry and no investigation. A post by a woman who had suffered sexual violence from a famous Sakha musician when she was six was also ignored by the media, and nobody looked into it. Only after many years did she find the courage to go to therapy. Now she is simply in therapy and does not even hope for justice. She sent me a video of herself at home with her family at Christmas while her abuser was singing on TV, and nobody in her family knew. She sat there quietly and shared her despair with me. It is very painful when you cannot help. Another case was an LGBT young man persecuted by his own parents, who locked him, a grown adult, in a house in a village so that he would not bring shame on the family. The fate of such people is unknown. They simply disappear, and we do not know what happens to them. I understood that in societies like this, with total control and constant fear of those in power, something happens to people that blocks an adequate perception of reality, and it is impossible to break through. That is how people who have killed others, and rapists, become idols, while victims of violence face aggressive victim blaming and have to leave their homeland. And the rapists get standing ovations, fame and respect.

I felt powerlessness mixed with deep anger born of despair.

Unusual Art (Album)

Black&White

But nobody will hear this, nobody will draw conclusions, and to them I will remain an unheard enemy. Later I would accept it, through long and hard work on myself, and at last let it go.

Always Move Forward

Do not disturb my peace.

I had no way out. I could no longer go back to vocal coaching, where I had created a gentle, ecological method of teaching singing, because I was burnt out. I started looking for work in music, anything that would let me keep doing it. I found an advert in the village of Kharp: a vocal specialist was needed. This is the settlement where the opposition leader Navalny would later die in prison. He was a man who nevertheless supported the annexation of Crimea, humiliated non-russian people and took part in russian nationalist marches. Despite all this, I personally feel sorry for him as someone who fought the regime, but I cannot support him as a political figure because of his immoral actions in the past, for which he never once apologised. Without thinking twice, I applied, and they took me straight after the interview. I flew there.

An Alien Planet

In Kharp I got to know the local people, and students came to me straight away. I met local people from one of the Indigenous peoples of the Arctic, and they told me how they were ignored, never invited anywhere and never included in the festive programmes with their folk singing. This resonated with me deeply. I started working with them and asked the management of the local arts centre to include them in the programme. Somehow the management agreed to include them in the programme for National Unity Day. We were happy. At that time there were internal conflicts in the team that I did not know about. The new management wanted to get rid of the old staff, whom I was friends with. The management did not like that.

Around the same time, the husband of one of my colleagues started coming to see me and staying strangely long, asking personal questions. I did not think much of it. But this colleague began treating me badly, and once it even ended with her shouting at my students during a rehearsal. I told her not to do that, and she shouted at me: “behave like a man”. Hearing that, I simply walked out of the hall.

My students encouraged me, and I tried to support them emotionally too before the performance. But everyone understood that things were heading towards me being fired, and the students were worried. One of them broke down on stage, cried and ran off right in front of the audience. Later she wrote me a touching message saying she was worried about me and could not hold herself together. Then the director called me in and asked me to resign. Without hesitating I wrote my resignation. Most of the team were shocked and asked me to withdraw it, but I understood that was impossible. When the students found out, they came to hug me, brought gifts, cried and asked me to stay, but I could not. I was empty inside. Once again I left for nowhere…

I stopped making music and was just surviving. I could not find a place to live in Moscow, because the main requirement of landlords was that the tenant be Slavic. So I found a place very far from Moscow, and so I could no longer work as a vocal coach with my Moscow students. I started writing a script for a project that would show me as I am, without any wish to please or to be understood by others. I opened my old drafts and sat down to work on songs in English.

Naive (Unpublished Album)

In Love

Bye

Free

Human

I’m Ayal

La La La

Life has no price

Slowly Snowing

Ms. Albino

Only Now

The Broad Way

Is Not The End

Realising that I was not coping, I applied for emotional support to an LGBT charity. Then came long work on myself, on understanding what had happened and how to live on. The war began… Or more precisely, the country that occupied my home republic more than 300 years ago and has been destroying all its resources and people attacked ukraine, which simply wanted to decide its own fate.

I was on the edge… I simply could not cope with anything. Then I left again for nowhere, but this time knowing I would not go back. In a country friendly to the regime I found the strength to somehow finish a studio album. It does not sound the way I first wanted, and it does not express that state, when out of despair and hopelessness you come back to what gives your life meaning. I decided to rework the unreleased album “Naive” and include several of its songs in the final album “I AM”.

I AM (Album)

Hey Earthling

The Terra

Bye

Mr. Albino

The Walls

Letter to the Queen

See Me

I Am

It's not the end

Human

The Billion Colours

Then came a propaganda article about me, hidden persecution in a neighbouring country, and mass hate and bullying on social media.

Fear for my life, desperate attempts to get to safety. Meeting kind people,

a plane,

London… and a chance to begin finding myself again.

I was lucky to work on an independent theatre production in London, “The Guest”, with the director Lucy Richardson and her whole team.

Now I am working on my solo project, where I am getting to know myself again: forgiving, accepting, supporting and inspiring myself, and no longer judging myself the way I used to.

I do not want to suffer any more, or to put my life on pause because I have to survive. I no longer want to try to be understood or accepted while not noticing myself. I do not want to talk about trauma and keep going back to the past. Before, I never had time to get to know myself, to ask questions, to look at what happened and draw conclusions. For me, finding myself in a world where freedom and justice really exist is like landing on another planet. And yet, as before, I can see the difficulties, the challenges and the dangers.

I look ahead with love, great hope and deep faith that nobody is limited by the culture they were born into, the country they come from, their age or the sex they were born with. We are human beings, something bigger than we can explain in words. We are free to choose not only who to be, but also which culture to belong to. I believe that everything is possible, and that this world can become a much safer and more tolerant place, with room for friendship, tolerance and mutual respect.

Drawing on my life experience and my inner compass, I was at last able to find the answer to the main question that has always followed me but that I never had the chance to answer. The question is simple: do you believe this world can still become better?

I put my answer into my manifesto.