Renew your subscription Renew your subscription Explore the broadening definition of mining safety in the post-covid, 4.0 world…. Mining Journal Intelligence’s Project Pipeline Handbook presents the methodology… This report series is a crucial tool for industry professionals and generalist investors… Track emerging trends and changes in the mining finance landscape along with investor… date:26/10/2020 location:Virtual Event Where digital meets Mining date:20/02/2023 location:Sydney Masonic Centre Meet the industry leaders who shape the Future of Mining in Australia date:27/03/2023 location:8 Northumberland Avenue, London, UK Exceptional investment opportunities selected by Mining Journal date:18/09/2023 location:Pan Pacific Perth Meet the industry leaders who shape the Future of Mining in Australia Position Location: Melbourne or Adelaide Promising Greenfields Au/Battery Minerals Projects Position Location: South-East Asia Greenfields Development Project Position Location: Perth Antipa Minerals Ltd is an ASX listed (AZY) mineral exploration company Position Location: Perth, Sydney or Canada Acacia is assisting GT1 in the appointment of their Corporate Development Manager Second niobium-REE success for WA1 as capital set to…
Fall 2022 COVID-19 Information Senior SRT major Henry Zelenak. Henry Zelenak, a senior Sound Recording Technology major from Albany with a minor in Computer Science, presented his research project, assisted by Department of Computer and Information Sciences Assistant Professor Shahin Mehdipour Ataee, at the IEEE Western New York Image and Signal Processing Workshop. The workshop was held at the Rochester Institute of Technology in early November.
Spatial audio has been on a slow rise in popularity over the past few years, and more and more clubs, venues, and corners of the industry are starting to notice. Yet the number of producers and audio engineers willing to learn how to mix in this new medium hasn't kept pace with how fast the technology has grown. This means there is no better time than now for producers and engineers looking to break into the pro audio world to strike while the iron is hot. And if you're looking for a place to start learning how to work with spatial audio, CRAS (Conservatory for Recording Arts & Sciences) and Spatial is the place to do it. They are an award-winning immersive audio technology and software set to unveil a groundbreaking new curriculum designed to train engineers and producers for new job opportunities in experiential, immersive audio. We sat down with Monica Bolles of Spatial to dive deep into why right now is the best time to use this powerful immerging technology. Monica Bolles is a digital artist, audio engineer, and composer from Boulder, CO, with a B.S. in Music Production from CU Denver and an M.S. in Creative Technology and Design from CU Boulder. She has created and produced works exhibited in the 140-channel speaker array at the Cube at Virginia Tech, the IMERSA Fulldome Summit, NIME (New Interfaces for Musical Expression), and the Conference of World Affairs, among others. There is a massive uptick in interest currently for spatial audio. When Oculus first announced its Kickstarter and launched the hype around VR, you suddenly saw all of these big audio companies beginning to pay attention to spatial audio. Before that, I’d say it existed in the fringes of academia and European research institutes like IRCAM. Now the industry is paying attention to the rise of VR/AR/XR, immersive experiences, and the metaverse… suddenly ‘immersive’ is the new hot thing, and everyone wants to be involved. That means that there are a lot of opportunities. It’s still early days, too, so I think there’s a lot of room for new faces. There are also many new toolsets on the market that make it much easier to be creative. Companies like Spatial are creating studio suites for non-linear spatial audio design specifically valuable for creating large-scale immersive installations and experiences. Other companies are actively pushing into applications for live music and in-home listening… With all the support behind new formats and toolsets, it is easier to create efficient workflows and focus on the creativity of the projects without worrying as much about technical complexities. There is a lot of educational noise right now, and it can be hard for someone interested in learning to work with spatial audio to find good information about what ‘spatial audio’ is. Many studio engineers I talk to that are just getting into spatial audio think it refers to Dolby Atmos. In truth, people use various algorithmic approaches to solve ‘spatialization,’ and each algorithm can offer them something different. While Dolby has created a particular set of standards and tools that work within those standards, there are so many other tools and standards being developed by other companies (like Spatial, which I mentioned above) that can be used to create a spatial audio mix. Every approach has a ‘sound,’ and choosing a spatial audio algorithm is like selecting an eq. Choosing the tool, you are using, or the standard depends on the application of your mix and what part of the industry you are trying to work in. In reality, the tools, workflows, and standards are still developing; there are still a lot of limitations, so you have to be willing to do the research, innovate, and think outside of your ‘traditional’ training. When creating a spatial mix, most of the tools available at this point focus on the ability to virtualize the positioning of sounds. However, due to the way these algorithms work, many tools we use as studio engineers, such as FXs, eq, and compression, won’t work. You could use regular plugins on a mono sound that is a ‘source’ in your audio space, but after that, you are limited as to what other ways you can affect the sound of the overall mix. Any tool you use after the spatial virtualization will affect the spatialization. I’m not sure Mastering has been figured out yet. You will also have to get good at routing and understanding how to do complex bussing. While DAWs have come a long way in making it easier to interface with different spatial audio formats, there will still be a certain amount of complexity to how you will need to route and set up your IO and configurations. Space. As a mix engineer, you constantly try to find space for your sounds. In stereo, we use eq and compression to help us find space. With spatial mixing, you don’t need to use those tools as much because you create space through virtualized space. You can help give your sounds space to breathe by just positioning them in different locations of your virtualized ‘space.’ Being in a ‘niche’ field has helped me in life. If you know something nobody else knows, you will set yourself up for being valuable. Are there more job prospects with this skill set? I think that’s hard to say. The industry is growing rampant, but many people are also trying to break into this space. As a mix engineer, you are competing against some of the top mix engineers in the industry that are hopping on the spatial audio hype train. If you are someone just coming out of school as an audio engineer, I think to break into spatial audio; you have to be passionate about it and find a way to approach it from a unique angle. Because it’s such a new industry, there’s still room for a lot of innovation; the rules are still being written so take advantage of that. Spatial audio is currently being used in many different audio industries, so this will vary based on what part of the industry you want to go into. The tools and processes you are going to use are going to be different too. Spatial audio is a massive component of the VR/AR/XR space. Most creators in this space use ambisonics-based toolsets and spatial audio plugins that allow 6 degrees of freedom. We are seeing spatial audio introduced to the live performance space. There is a lot of exciting work around designing spatial audio installations for theme parks, event spaces, museums, and health facilities. The Spatial, Inc. toolset is paving the way for non-linear content creation most applicable to building sound worlds for installations. More and more music is being mixed for spatial audio. Car manufacturers are starting to include spatial audio. Sennheiser Ambeo Mobility is taking the lead on this. Almost every part of the industry is being influenced by spatial audio. Some tremendous online communities have a lot of knowledge to share and can be good to join and learn from if you are starting. I help host a virtual Spatial Audio Meetup through NOTAM and also help co-host the Immersive Audio Podcast, both great resources for learning about many of the tools and projects people are working on. There is also the Spatial Audio in VR/AR/MR group on Facebook, which I highly recommend anyone in the industry to join. AES has conferences specifically oriented toward spatial audio; sometimes, they host online events. Anyone with the correct initiative can quickly learn how to mix binaural audio with free or near-free toolsets. Still, if you want to start working with multichannel systems, you have to find a place to let you come in and start playing with their system. For that, I would recommend finding a university with facilities that you can use and programs oriented toward spatial audio. Some places host residencies or more short-term programs as well. Managing Editor at Magnetic Magazine – Former Marketing Manager at the Hyperbits Masterclass – Writer, Content Strategist, Music Producer, and Record Label Manager
The best budget headphones. · Source: Headphones are a discrete and affordable solution for working on the go, and they’re essential for monitoring while tracking. We’ve selected some of the best budget headphones for music production and we’ll discuss some features to help you choose the right pair of cans. Headphones are built with different designs, so it’s important to know some of the basic terminologies to ensure you pick the right type for your specific purpose: If you’re looking for a decent affordable option, the SRH240 is a closed-back pair of headphones that offers good isolation. This makes them useful for monitoring while tracking and you’ll be able to easily work discretely. The low impedance rating of 38 ohms means the SRH240 will perform well on a wide range of devices including consumer devices without an integrated headphone preamplifier. Downsides? Well, the 2-meter lead is perhaps not the greatest design, but these are still great-value headphones for the price. Shure SRH240 Shure SRH240 The MDR-7506 has been the industry standard in film, TV, broadcast, and music studios for decades in the US and many other countries too. They’re comfortable, well-built, and offer decent isolation. In addition, they reach low enough to deal with the frequency range found in today’s more sub-heavy music styles. So whether you use them for recording or mixing, the 7506 will prove equal to the task. One weak point, however, is the coating on the earpads tends to flake off after years of frequent use. So to avoid this, you can replace the pads with more durable ones from Dekoni. Sony MDR-7506 Sony MDR-7506 The popular ATH-M40x is another excellent closed-back design with great build quality for the price. They might not be the best-sounding pair of headphones ever, but as long as you reference back and forth with your monitors, you should be OK. They do, however, provide an excellent and long-lasting solution for discrete monitoring while tracking vocals or instruments. This is precisely why many studios have batches of them in the equipment locker. With an impedance rating of 35 ohms, the ATH-M40x is also suitable for consumer devices and is also widely used by DJs. Audio-Technica ATH-M40X The classic K240 has been part of the furniture in studios since its introduction in 1975. The comfortable semi-open design makes them a great choice for mixing and editing at home or while traveling. As a package, the K240 MKII ships with both coiled and straight cables, plus an additional set of velour earpads for additional comfort during extended hours in use. The detail and relative neutrality you get from these headphones are the reason many producers and engineers swear by them – a great value set of cans. AKG K240 MKII AKG K-240 MKII It would be impossible not to have Beyerdynamic in the conversation; after all, they did invent dynamic headphones back in 1937! The DT 990 Pro is an open-back design that offers reduced ear fatigue, making it the better choice for mixing, Being open-back headphones, the isolation properties aren’t the greatest so they’re not ideal for recording purposes. In addition, the 250 Ohms impedance rating means they will perform optimally with devices that offer preamplification. You can find decent headphones preamps on some desktop mixers, audio interfaces, and monitor controllers, so be sure to get something portable if you plan on using the DT 990 Pro on the go. Beyerdynamic DT 990 Pro beyerdynamic DT-990 Pro After taking a quick poll around the Gearnews team, we found that most of us had at least one pair of AKG K240s lying around! but what are your favourite budget headphones? Do you have a favourite pair of headphones you’d like to share with our readers? Please let us know in the comments below! Videos: By loading the video, you agree to YouTube’s privacy policy. Learn more Load video
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* Note: This article contains promotional links that help us fund our site. Don’t worry: the price for you always stays the same! If you buy something through these links, we will receive a small commission. Thank you for your support! How do you like this post? Gotta say it’s weird as heck not having Slate VSX on this list. Thanks for the suggestion, but at close to $500, the Slate VSX is far from being a budget set of headphones. thank you for sharing! watching the video interview made everything click. i’ll be getting a decent pair of closed backs soon. Your email address will not be published.Required fields are marked *
· They look like surveillance cameras, and I feel they’re trying to normalize a society where everyone is constantly monitored. · beautiful keyboard, but the new form of synthesis doesn’t sound groundbreaking, quite cheesy actually if we’re to judge by these examples · I’m using mine as a second voice ( via MIDI ) to my Medusa in a live drone setup, and let me tell you, it really complements the Medusa. It’s so much fun tweaking both whilst a set of notes are held,…
Space Station NASA Television coverage of today’s spacewalk with NASA astronauts Josh Cassada and Frank Rubio is now underway and also is available on the NASA app, the space station blog and the agency’s website. The crew members of Expedition 68 are preparing to exit the International Space Station‘s Quest airlock for a spacewalk expected to begin about 8 a.m. EST and last approximately seven hours. Cassada and Rubio will assemble a mounting bracket on the starboard side of the station’s truss assembly in preparation for the installation of a pair of International Space Station Rollout Solar Arrays (iROSAs) during upcoming spacewalks. Cassada will serve as extravehicular crew member 1 (EV 1) and will wear a suit with red stripes. Rubio will serve as extravehicular crew member 2 (EV 2) and will wear the unmarked suit. The spacewalk will be the first for both Cassada and Rubio. Learn more about station activities by following the space station blog, @space_station and @ISS_Research on Twitter, as well as the ISS Facebook and ISS Instagram accounts. Get weekly video highlights at: http://jscfeatures.jsc.nasa.gov/videoupdate/ Get the latest from NASA delivered every week. Subscribe here: www.nasa.gov/subscribe Your email address will not be published.Required fields are marked *
When: Fri., Nov. 18, 12 p.m.-12 a.m. St. Petersburg, FL: Pinellas Ale Works, PAW ART PULSE GALLERY, 1962 1st Avenue South, St. Pete announces the latest art exhibit of Tim Gibbons, BIGFOOT MEETS STAR WARS, November 18-December 30. In Tim’s latest show invites you into the fantasy of Bigfoot and Star Wars characters as friends partying together. 7272350970 [email protected] www.pawbeer.com Pinellas Ale Works 1962 First Avenue South, St. Petersburg St. Pete (727) 235-0970 Clay Center of St. Petersburg 0.03 miles Cage Brewing 0.04 miles Wild Roots 0.04 miles Spitfire Comedy House 0.05 miles Good Intentions 0.06 miles Creative Clay 0.08 miles Hotbins, an Amazon return store where prices change daily, opens in Tampa Netflix dating show ‘Love is Blind’ is looking for Tampa contestants ‘Morally we cannot continue to stand by:’ Tampa’s Blended Festival is not going to happen or Browse all Film Times Subscribe now to get the latest news delivered right to your inbox. The grounds outside Orlando’s Tinker Field turned into Daisy Lane over the weekend as one of the country’s largest EDM festivals, Electric… A recent study ranked the Tampa area among the nation’s top cities in 2022 for “fast food lovers,” and it’s easy to… By Min Craig A fully redone St. Petersburg home with a secret boozy addition is now on the market in the Old Historic Old Northeast… By CL Staff The Tampa Museum of Art will soon open the new exhibition “Time for Change: Art and Social Unrest in the Jorge M.… By Chloe Greenberg Read our sister publications 633 N. Franklin Street, Suite 735 Tampa, FL 33602
Is the Yamaha NS-10 still relevant? · Source: Veikko Venemies / Unsplash / Yamaha Since its introduction in 1978, the Yamaha NS-10 series of passive loudspeakers has had an unprecedented impact on the music industry with over 300,000 units sold to date. For a failed bookshelf speaker, becoming the global standard studio monitor was completely unintentional but nevertheless, it was religiously adopted by top engineers like Bob Clearmountain, Andy Wallace, and Manny Marroquin. When it was eventually discontinued in 2001, there were a total of six different models of NS-10 speakers, each offering a slightly different feature set to the original NS-10M. Over this time, the NS-10 series polarized opinions continuously as it does today. In fact, the voices questioning its relevance have grown louder in recent years, and for good reason. The way we consume music has completely changed since the NS-10 rose to fame, and the sonic hallmarks of pop music have shifted somewhat. Is there still room for the NS-10 in the landscape of modern music? Or is it more of a novelty? The HS-5 is the entry-level model of the popular HS series of active monitor speakers launched back in 2014. It’s an affordable 5″ monitor that is relatively neutral sounding and can produce good results in smaller listening environments. The fact that these have a relatively similar approach to the NS-10 style of monitoring without requiring an amp is probably why they are so popular. That being said, active speakers project sound in a different way to passives. So keep this in mind. The Yamaha HS Series. Yamaha HS 5 With the help of superstar mix engineer and longtime NS-10 user, Chris Lord-Alge, Avantone reincarnated the NS-10 in the form of the CLA-10. This is as close as you’ll get to the original in a modern day monitor. Like the NS-10M , it’s passive, which means you don’t get that hyped sound that we often associate with active monitors. Moreover, Avantone has a reputation for creating unforgiving monitors like the Mixcubes with excellent translation properties. Avantone CLA-10 Avantone CLA-10 As you know, passive monitoring performance is largely reliant on the amp you have driving your speakers. The Auratone A2-30 was developed in collaboration with Bettermaker as a compact solution for passive near-field monitors. It’s a comparably affordable way to drive your NS-10s in a reliable and uncoloured way. Designed for the 5C passive Sound Cubes, you can be sure that translation is the prime directive here. Auratone A2-30 Auratone A2-30 A truly modern remake, the CLA-10A brings the NS-10 monitoring experience in an active monitoring format that is far better suited to home recording setups. With 200W amplification, it’s more than enough power to produce accurate mixing levels. If you’re wondering what the Variable Tissue Paper Control knob on the rear panel does, it allows you to simulate your favourite NS10 models. At over $1000 a pair, the CLA-10A is entering pro monitor territory, so you must really want the NS-10 sound. Avantone CLA-10A Avantone CLA-10A Those who didn’t stockpile NS-10 drivers were heartbroken when Yamaha stopped producing them. Luckily, these days, you can continue using your favourite monitors forever, as you can now replace the woofer, the crossover, and even the tweeter. These Avantone will fit the NS-10M perfectly, and the installation is simple enough to DIY. What’s more, many users have even reported that they prefer the sound of the modern replacement cones. Go figure. Avantone AV-10 Avantone AV-10 Woofer Are you an advocate of the NS-10s and if not, what are your favourite active or passive alternatives? Please let us know in the comments below! Videos: By loading the video, you agree to YouTube’s privacy policy. Learn more Load video
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* Note: This article contains promotional links that help us fund our site. Don’t worry: the price for you always stays the same! If you buy something through these links, we will receive a small commission. Thank you for your support! How do you like this post? Never could see any reason to call these e monitors. They are not neutral . They are not even flat in frequency response. There is no standard of bad There are a myriad of ways to be wrong. So poor Translation no. hs series is not much better. I loved my NS10M’s. They sounded great to my non-professional ear and looked absolutely fantastic in my little bedroom studio. Bought brand new in 1998 but foolishly sold them 10 years later to help fund the purchase of the new Korg M3. I did manage to sell them for a small profit. “…active speakers project sound in a different way to passives. So keep that in mind.” Whoa there… this deserves at least a little bit of elaboration. Especially since it’s likely most of us have heard nothing about this “difference,” whatever it is. I highly recommend visiting a professional studio in your city and finding out for yourself. It’s not something that can be accurately explained in 100 words, especially since monitoring mostly comes down to personal taste. In my experience, active monitors have a more hyped sound, but there are other factors like the choice of amp, speaker positioning, and room acoustics that are critical factors. This is why I recommend teaching your ears the difference rather than attaining a purely theoretical understanding. Hope this helps! Your email address will not be published.Required fields are marked *
· They look like surveillance cameras, and I feel they’re trying to normalize a society where everyone is constantly monitored. · beautiful keyboard, but the new form of synthesis doesn’t sound groundbreaking, quite cheesy actually if we’re to judge by these examples · I’m using mine as a second voice ( via MIDI ) to my Medusa in a live drone setup, and let me tell you, it really complements the Medusa. It’s so much fun tweaking both whilst a set of notes are held,…
c/o Vochlea Music Created by Vochlea Music, Dubler 2 helps music producers harness the most intuitive instrument of all: the human voice. Having the right tools and processes that allow for frictionless output of creative ideas is paramount to any musician's workflow. This notion is a key pillar of London-based Vochlea Music, an audio company empowering creatives with Dubler 2. The advanced voice-to-MIDI desktop application uses the most intuitive instrument of all, the human voice, to effortlessly print musical ideas into MIDI. Dubler 2 is a standalone app which connects to any DAW. It comes with a game-changing "MIDI Capture" AU/VST plugin, which musicians can utilize to produce and manipulate vocal-driven beats without even touching a keyboard. It's important to note that Dubler 2 is compatible only with dynamic microphones. After you've connected your mic (the same way you would an external MIDI keyboard) and trained it to your voice—a process that takes less than 30 seconds—you’ll be able to use the software within your DAW. The program allows producers to trigger oneshot samples, control synths, play chords, manipulate filters and effects, lock to a key, track pitch, pitch-bend and simultaneously control envelopes, velocity and MIDI mapping values. Created by Vochlea Music, Dubler 2 helps music producers harness the most intuitive instrument of all: the human voice. Bonobo, Beyoncé and Diplo also received nominations in the Dance/Electronic categories. A new study found that rats share a similar strength to humans when it comes to beat-synchronizing between 120-140 BPM music. The Dubler 2 interface. c/o Vochlea Music The most straightforward way to use Dubler 2 is to sing notes into your microphone and watch the software turn them into MIDI inside your DAW real-time. And with 14 scales and advanced key detection and suggestion, you don't have to be an adept singer to utilize its voice-to-MIDI feature. You can also take advantage of the “Sing in Notes” feature, which displays a list of selected keys that match your input signal in case you’re unsure about the key of your project. It doesn't stop there. Dubler 2 allows for even more advanced voice-to-MIDI controls. If you enjoy beatboxing, you can map various vocal samples along with claps or snaps, and trigger them in real time for complex drum grooves. You can also choose from a list of chord presets to easily create progressions from scratch, or map your voice to effects and parameters inside your DAW. Dubler 2 is available for purchase starting at $219. You can sign up here to be among the first to get access to Vochlea Music’s next livestreams. Facebook:facebook.com/vochlea Instagram:instagram.com/vochlea Twitter:twitter.com/vochlea Website: vochlea.com Konstantinos Karakolis is a freelance music journalist based in Athens, Greece. Karakolis, who also produces electronic and hip-hop music, has been a steadfast contributor to EDM.com for over four years, focusing predominantly on music reviews. He also curates the brand’s “Underground Vibes” series, where he showcases unheralded musicians representing the next wave of dance music. Sign up for the latest news, exclusive giveaways & more. The ODD Ball is a feature-packed MIDI instrument that provides a unique beat-making experience. Fender’s American Acoustasonic Jazzmaster Guitar offers electronic music producers and DJs an all-in-one solution for more creative guitar sounds. The Nintendo MPC thoughtfully incorporates all the must-have features of leading DJ controllers. Looking for an affordable controller to help your workflow? We have a few to tell you about. The Web3-based VOID platform allows music producers to create a beat-reactive mosaic. The phone can be used as a MIDI controller and vocal synthesizer to breathe new life into old technology. SynthNes is innovating using the tools of a formative era in videogame technology. The contest arrives ahead of the momentous launch of Timbaland’s Beatclub platform.
The best budget effects pedals for synths and drum machines. · Source: Julio Lopez / Unsplash / Boss When you buy a new synth or drum machine, guitar pedals are probably the last thing on your mind. However, their sound quality and creative potential are undeniable, so let’s check out some of the best budget effects pedals. Not only are pedals relatively affordable, but they can help you create more distinctive sounds with your instruments. There is a clear difference between using the average monosynth dry, for example, and using it with two or three effects pedals chained together. If you’re just looking to add a few mono effects in line on a single instrument, the method is simple. Doing things in mono is cheaper, but as your setup grows, you’ll find the most economical way to use effects pedals is to run them as parallel processors from the aux sends of a compact mixing desk. If you want your signal level optimized, this process requires additional tools like the Radial EXTC. When you start to explore, the scope of effects available is staggering. From effects that add spatial dimensionality, vary the tonal character, or allow you to control the dynamics. We’ve selected a few to get you started that are not only affordable but offer value through versatility. The Flashback 2 is a two-in/two-outstereo delay and looper pedal with eight algorithms and three storage slots for saving your own patches. The operation is easy enough to understand, and you have the added bonus of features like the app-controlled TonePrint preset system and the MASH footswitch giving you more dynamics. The range of sounds you can get is excellent for a pedal this size, and the inclusion of the algorithm modeled on the famous 2290 delayfrom the 1980s is undoubtedly welcome. TC Electronic Flashback 2 tc electronic Flashback 2 Delay Like the Flashback, the Hall of Fame 2 is also a two-in/two-out effect with eight tweakable reverb types and three slots for custom TonePrint presets. The MASH footswitch gives you more expression control, which is extremely useful if you’re planning to take the DAW-less route for creating and performing music. Overall, it’s a decent-sounding reverb that offers algorithms to suit both synths and drums. TC Electronic Hall of Fame 2 tc electronic Hall of Fame 2 The trusty DS-1 has recently been added to the Boss Waza Craft line of pedals. It’s a sound we know and love on almost everything. From leads and basses to drums, and we’ve even heard it used on vocals by The Beastie Boys. The DS-1w has two distortion modes: standard and custom. While standard gives you the original DS-1 sound, custom mode tightens the midrange, producing a more aggressive sound on some instruments. Read more about the DS-1w here. Boss DS-1w Boss DS-1w Distortion As the name suggests the Mod 11 gives you eleven different modulation effects and tap tempo. If you’re not familiar with EHX, authentic tones are the name of the game. Sure it might not be stereo, but these pedals sound great on synths and keys. If you’re looking for something with a slightly vintage edge, the Mod 11 is worth checking out. Electro Harmonix Mod 11 Electro Harmonix Mod 11 Modulator Need to compress your leads and basslines? The Kinematic gives you a VCA compressor and controllable envelope filter in one simple device. Some might find it a little synth specific, as you can’t set your attack and release like some other pedals. That being said, decent compressor pedals are pricey, and this provides three patch points for linking with other modular equipment. You can modulate the filter or level, and use the envelope to control another device, which expands the possibilities. Dreadbox Kinematic Dreadbox Kinematic By loading the video, you agree to YouTube’s privacy policy. Learn more Load video
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* Note: This article contains promotional links that help us fund our site. Don’t worry: the price for you always stays the same! If you buy something through these links, we will receive a small commission. Thank you for your support! How do you like this post? Your email address will not be published.Required fields are marked *
· They look like surveillance cameras, and I feel they’re trying to normalize a society where everyone is constantly monitored. · beautiful keyboard, but the new form of synthesis doesn’t sound groundbreaking, quite cheesy actually if we’re to judge by these examples · I’m using mine as a second voice ( via MIDI ) to my Medusa in a live drone setup, and let me tell you, it really complements the Medusa. It’s so much fun tweaking both whilst a set of notes are held,…
What’s better than a surprise Grogu moment? One that is in tandem with Studio Ghibli! Directed by Katsuya Kondō, the hand-drawn short titled Zen – Grogu and Dust Bunnies is a collaboration between the two studios, and it is truly and honestly 3 minutes of pure cuteness overload. The video features Grogu floating and using the Force to focus, only to be distracted by the dust bunnies as they come to swirl around him. And yes, this short has made me determined to get a Studio Ghibli-inspired Grogu tattoo, thank you so much. His big ears are the most adorable thing I have ever seen in my life. Like much of Studio Ghibli’s films, the short has an air of whimsy to it that makes you want to live in the film. If I can’t be best friends with Totoro, then can I be best friends with this little floating Grogu? Please? I love him so much. The hand-drawn animated short is a first for the two studios and hopefully it is the start of a beautiful collaboration between the two fan-favorite creators—mainly because I would watch an entire series of these Zen shorts featuring different Star Wars characters. In fact, if it is just a series of Grogu shorts, I’d watch them every day of my life. Disney’s press release for the short film gave us some information about it, describing like so: “Disney+ shared a special surprise today for fans of Lucasfilm’s The Mandalorian. A new, original short, Zen – Grogu and Dust Bunnies, from famed Japanese animation house Studio Ghibli, will premiere on November 12, exclusively on Disney+ in celebration of the third anniversary of the streaming service and the debut of popular Star Wars series The Mandalorian. The hand-drawn, animated short is directed by Katsuya Kondo with music by Ludwig Göransson.” And maybe it works so well because it’s the style we’ve come to know and love from Studio Ghibli mixed with the sweet Child who has taken over the internet (mixed with another amazing score from Göransson) but it’s the best 3-minute gift you could gift yourself today. It’s just adorable. That’s pretty much the only thing I could think throughout the entire thing. The plot is simple: The dust bunnies are floating around Grogu, and he starts to run away but ends up falling, and then the dust bunnies give him a flower to make up for it. And frankly, that’s all we really needed plot-wise. This isn’t some grand big movie—it’s just something to bring joy to both fans of Studio Ghibli and Lucasfilm. This is, also, one of those collaborations that work and make sense for both studios. The instant reaction online to the news of Studio Ghibli and Lucasfilm working together was one of excitement because we all knew what the possibilities were. Luckily, we were gifted with the sweetest short and (hopefully) more of the same in the future. Zen – Grogu and Dust Bunnies is available on Disney+ and is 3 minutes of non-stop yelling about how cute it is, and that should be enough to get you watching it right now. (featured image: Lucasfilm/Studio Ghibli) —The Mary Sue has a strict comment policy that forbids, but is not limited to, personal insults toward anyone, hate speech, and trolling.— Have a tip we should know? [email protected] Resident Spider-Man expert, official Leslie Knope, actually Yelena Belova. Wanda Maximoff has never done anything wrong in her life. New York writer with a passion for all things nerdy. Yes, she has a Pedro Pascal podcast. Have a tip or story idea? Email us. Or to keep it anonymous, click here.
Best free plug-ins this week: Apricot, Epoch Amp, TesslaPRO mkIII · Source: nakst, Gearnews This week’s collection of the best free plug-ins starts out with Apricot, an exciting hybrid synthesizer in the new CLAP format. We’ve also got an amp modeling plug-in with four amps to choose from, and an updated version of one of the most popular free saturation plug-ins. Check out our huge archive for many more free plug-ins! Less than a month after Fluctus, nakst presents another great-looking synthesizer in the new CLAP plug-in format. Apricot is a hybrid synth with two oscillators, a third (sub) oscillator, and a sample layer. The oscillators include a unison mode based on the classic JP-8000 Supersaw waveform. Two envelopes, two LFOs, and over 70 destinations provide ample modulation possibilities. In addition to this, Apricot includes an arpeggiator/sequencer and five effects. Apricot is now in public beta. The plug-in is exclusively available in the CLAP plug-in format (currently supported by Bitwig Studio) and as a native FL Studio plug-in. It runs on Windows and Linux. Get Apricot here Following up on their machine-learning-based emulation of the Ibanez Tube Screamer, GuitarML has released Epoch Amp. The amp modeling plug-in includes four different amps ranging from clean to high-gain. The developer says that the gain knob has been carefully calibrated to capture the full range of the amps. In addition to input and output level controls, Epoch Amp offers a mix knob for blending the clean and distorted signals. It also includes IRs for each amp model, or you can use your own. Epoch Amp is available for Windows, macOS and Linux in VST3, AU, AAX, and LV2 formats. Get Epoch Amp here The Tessla series by Variety of Sound has long been a favorite among the many free saturation plug-ins out there. The developer says that the latest version of TesslaPRO is a “technical redesign” and that it has been refined to capture more sonic details while reducing audible distortions. The idea is to bring subtle analog artefacts and coloring into the digital domain and to add depth and dimension to your mixes. You can’t go wrong with TesslaPRO, so be sure to grab the update! TesslaPRO mkIII is a VST plug-in for Windows (32/64 bit). Get TesslaPRO mkIII here By loading the video, you agree to YouTube’s privacy policy. Learn more Load video
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· They look like surveillance cameras, and I feel they’re trying to normalize a society where everyone is constantly monitored. · beautiful keyboard, but the new form of synthesis doesn’t sound groundbreaking, quite cheesy actually if we’re to judge by these examples · I’m using mine as a second voice ( via MIDI ) to my Medusa in a live drone setup, and let me tell you, it really complements the Medusa. It’s so much fun tweaking both whilst a set of notes are held,…
Best free plug-ins this week: RO-GOLD, TugGlicento, TRAX · Source: 2Rule, Gearnews It’s time for our weekly round-up of the best free plug-ins, and boy do we have a line-up for you this week! Black Rooster Audio serves up some tasty plate reverbs with RO-GOLD, 2Rule TugGlicento is a sequenced multi-effect, and TRAX from Analog Obsession is an easy-to-use transient designer. In the mood for even more free plug-ins? Check out our archive! Every once in a while, a free plug-in comes along that I would describe as a must-have. RO-GOLD by Black Rooster Audio is one of those cases. Modeled after the iconic EMT 140 plate reverb and upgraded with a 24k solid gold plate, RO-GOLD serves up retro plate reverbs that’ll add that classic vintage sparkle to any production. The controls are simple, but effective: In addition to the Pre-delay and Dry/Wet knobs, you can fine-tune the sound using the Bass Cut and Damper knobs. RO-GOLD is available for macOS (including Apple Silicon) and Windows in VST, AU, and AAX formats. Get RO-GOLD here TugGlicento by 2Rule is a multi-effect plug-in for rhythmic, modulated effects. You can load up a different effect in each of the five lines, and use the grid sequencer to trigger and apply the effects rhythmically. Lines can play at different speeds and durations, and a randomizer delivers some pretty wacky results if you dare. In addition to this, TugGlicento includes a 5-band Moog filter, an ADSR envelope, an LFO, and a modulation matrix. Chop up your audio using rhythmic effects!. TugGlicento is available for macOS (VST, AU) and Windows (VST3). Get TugGlicento here Lastly, Analog Obsession has a new transient designer named TRAX. It’s a pretty simple affair with just three knobs, but that’s all a transient designer really needs. You can adjust the attack and sustain to dial in just the right amounts of punch and body, and use the output level control to compensate for any gain changes. Like all newer plug-ins by the developer, TRAX also offers 4x oversampling. A great tool to have in your arsenal for quick and easy transient adjustments. TRAX is available for macOS and Windows in VST, VST3, and AU formats. Get TRAX here By loading the video, you agree to YouTube’s privacy policy. Learn more Load video
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· They look like surveillance cameras, and I feel they’re trying to normalize a society where everyone is constantly monitored. · beautiful keyboard, but the new form of synthesis doesn’t sound groundbreaking, quite cheesy actually if we’re to judge by these examples · I’m using mine as a second voice ( via MIDI ) to my Medusa in a live drone setup, and let me tell you, it really complements the Medusa. It’s so much fun tweaking both whilst a set of notes are held,…
Apple Music’s Spatial Audio with support for Dolby Atmos is now available natively in select Mercedes-Benz models for the first time.
The two companies have revealed that Apple Music with Spatial Audio will now come fully integrated through the MBUX infotainment system in the Mercedes-Maybach S-Class, EQS, EQS SUV, EQE, EQE SUV, and the standard S-Class. Mercedes-Benz owners already subscribed to Apple Music will gain immediate access to a growing array of songs available in Spatial Audio. The limited-edition Mercedes-Maybach by Virgil Abloh was the automaker’s first model to offer the Spatial Audio technology through its high-end Burmester 4D sound system. Read Also: 2024 Mercedes EQE SUV Offers A Range Of 370 Miles And Tech For Days “Sound quality is incredibly important to Apple Music which is why we are so excited to be working with Mercedes to make Spatial Audio on Apple Music available natively in the car for the first time,” Apple’s vice president of Apple Music and Beats, Oliver Schusser, said in a press release. “Spatial Audio is revolutionizing the way artists create and fans listen to music and it’s an experience that is impossible to explain in words; you have to hear it for yourself to appreciate it. Together with Mercedes, we now have even more opportunities to bring wholly immersive music to our subscribers all over the world.” The Burmester high-end 4D sound consists of 31 speakers that include six 3D speakers in the roof, 4 near-ear speakers in the front seats, an 18.5-liter subwoofer, 8 sound transducers, 2 amplifiers, and 1,750 watts of power. “We’re joining forces to offer our customers a benchmark music experience unparalleled in the industry,” added member of the board of management of Mercedes-Benz Group AG, Markus Schäfer. “We are proud that our vehicles will be the first-ever non-Apple devices to natively feature immersive Spatial Audio with Dolby Atmos. This seamless experience shows how in-car entertainment can reach exciting new levels by perfectly integrating hardware and software.” G-Power’s BMW M3 is available in 620 hp, 670 hp, and 720 hp configurations. Bentley has partnered with a leading ski brand to venture into winter sports. The 2023 Toyota Prius is a dramatic departure from its predecessors. The fifth-generation Toyota Prius will have a sleek new Crown-inspired design. The app-based rental program will have daily, weekly, monthly, and even annual terms. A trio of playlists are coming to Spotify to celebrate the V12, the V10, and the turbo V8. The Genesis X Convertible concept has an all-electric architecture and powertrain. The Spanish start-up says its first EV will be available in the first quarter of 2024. The range-topping Lexus LS 500h will set you back $113,435. The event should include detailed specs about the truck and might even have a surprise or two.
Save on Ableton Live 11. · Source: Until January 11, 2023, you can save on Ableton Live 11 with offers that include Intro, Standard, Suite, and upgrade editions. So whether you’ve been thinking of switching DAW systems – or simply waiting for the right time to upgrade – this offer is a great opportunity to save. When Live became popular as a DAW, it was mostly synonymous with electronic music production and live performance. While it is still one of the best options for this purpose, Live has come a long way since then. Because of its practicality and creative utility, its also become widely used among songwriters, producers, and mix engineers working with a range of different music styles beyond EDM. With a learning curve that doesn’t intimidate beginners, Live is a great way to learn about music production. Its simple workflow is centered around two main windows: Session view, with your clip overview, and Arrange view, for your sequencing operations. The unique collection of plug-ins features collaborations with top software designers like AAS, and Max for Live offers an extremely versatile programming environment for using and creating unique software instruments and effects. When combined with the instrument and effect racks and the ease at which you can incorporate external MIDI devices in your workflow, Live will quickly become the central hub of your music production studio. You can get the following Ableton deals from Thomann until January 11, 2023: Ableton Live 11 Suite Download Ableton Live 11 Standard Download Ableton Live 11 Intro Download Ableton Live 11 Suite UPG Lite Download Note: This article contains affiliate links that help us fund our site. Don’t worry: the price for you always stays the same! We will receive a small commission if you buy something through these links. Thank you for your support! How do you like this post? Your email address will not be published.Required fields are marked *
· They look like surveillance cameras, and I feel they’re trying to normalize a society where everyone is constantly monitored. · beautiful keyboard, but the new form of synthesis doesn’t sound groundbreaking, quite cheesy actually if we’re to judge by these examples · I’m using mine as a second voice ( via MIDI ) to my Medusa in a live drone setup, and let me tell you, it really complements the Medusa. It’s so much fun tweaking both whilst a set of notes are held,…
How the country’s vast rail system has helped it withstand an invasion. Damaged railway lines near Zolochiv. Credit…Adam Ferguson for The New York Times Supported by Send any friend a story As a subscriber, you have 10 gift articles to give each month. Anyone can read what you share. By Sarah A. Topol To hear more audio stories from publications like The New York Times, download Audm for iPhone or Android. On the night of Feb. 23, when Kyiv was still rife with rumors and denials about the Russian troops and weaponry amassing along the border, Oleksandr Kamyshin, the 38-year-old chief executive of Ukrzaliznytsia — Ukraine’s national rail system — sent a photograph to the management’s Telegram group chat in an attempt to settle everyone’s nerves. The photo showed him tucking his two sons, 8 and 12, into bed in their apartment in central Kyiv. The head of passenger services, Oleksandr Pertsovskyi, replied with a photo of his toddler taking a bath. The implication of both photos was clear: The leaders, and their families, were staying put. Kamyshin had been in charge of Ukrzaliznytsia for only six months. Still in his trial period, he hadn’t even been offered a permanent contract. When he was hired, he espoused all the Western-approved jargon of railway reform that had been demanded of Ukraine for years — “higher freight yields,” “vertical integration,” “rolling-stock renewal,” “cargo turnover” and so on. Kamyshin had spent eight years on the management board of System Capital Management, an investment house belonging to Ukraine’s richest oligarch, Rinat Ahmetov, which oversaw the iron-ore and coal magnate’s freight trains. He ran international marathons, including the New York City Marathon, collected fine red wines and was a devoted fan of the internet-famous restaurateur Salt Bae, whom he once met in Istanbul. When the bombing started at 4 a.m., Kamyshin decided there was no time for the Western management techniques he had championed. He sent his wife and children and a majority of the Ukrzaliznytsia leadership team west. A command cell of six stayed in the center of Ukraine, all of them career railway men (yes, only men) who could close their eyes and recite the railway map down to the names and sizes of stations, how many tracks ran into each. The team decided it was important to project strength and fearlessness — to show that Ukrainians would not be terrorized. Over the course of the next 100 days, these six men and Kamyshin would dictate where the trains would run, along which routes, what they would transport and where. “We don’t have discussions, we don’t have a lot of opinions, we don’t have long conversations — all decisions are made instantly and they are binding,” Kamyshin told me in May. “I understood that if I sat down and took the time to make balanced decisions, it would be worse than a wrong decision.” For safety, the cell decided to move around Ukraine by train, working out of the carriages; they also nominated their replacements, in the event that any of them were killed. Between saboteurs and Russian troops pouring into the country, they assumed they were being hunted, so they regularly changed locomotives, carriages and routes as they traveled from place to place. Ukraine’s airspace was closed a few days before the invasion, and movement in, out and around the country was immediately curtailed. The Russians attacked from multiple fronts — the land, the skies and the seas. They came overland from the north toward Kyiv and into Kharkiv; they went from Crimea in the south into Mariupol and Mykolaiv, and from the east into Luhansk and Donetsk, the regions known collectively as the Donbas. In late February and through March, terrified Ukrainians across the country made their way to their cities’ main train stations. Panicked people on the platform tried to break into the carriages, mobbing the doors and beating them with their hands. When allowed to board, they folded their bodies into the compartments: Luxury sleeper carriages made for 18 would hold 150, a second-class carriage, made for 54, would carry 500. These people had left everything, possibly lost everything, and now they were packed shoulder to shoulder so tightly there was no room to sit. The largest refugee crisis in Europe since World War II had begun. For days that turned into weeks, Ukrzaliznytsia employees worked nonstop, without breaks, moving people away from this nightmare. Trains quickly became the backbone of the country: essential to the war effort, crucial to moving people, weapons, goods and supplies, as well as providing a diplomatic avenue and an economic lifeline. As Russia began to target critical infrastructure, the job took on an added danger. Trains “running on schedule” — a catchphrase Kamyshin repeated as a mantra — became a symbol of normalcy in the most abnormal situation. For so long Ukrzaliznytsia has been a symbol of Ukraine, its history, its colonization, its aspirations for change and its inability to attain that reality. Post-independence in 1991, the state monopoly had come to embody the morass of much of Ukraine’s attempts at post-Soviet reform — emblematic of the endemic corruption, political infighting and cronyism. In this time of existential crisis, however, Ukrzaliznytsia made its own contribution to Ukrainian resilience, reflecting the country’s unification in the face of imminent destruction. Ukrzaliznytsia is so vast it has long been referred to as “a country within a country.” There are 230,000 employees, from those on the trains themselves (locomotive drivers, their assistants, train attendants, conductors) to everyone at the station (stationmasters, security officers, ticket sellers, luggage-storage clerks, cleaners) and then everyone behind the scenes (track inspectors, car inspectors, signal maintainers, structural engineers, electricians, electronic-equipment engineers, locomotive electricians, greasers, train dispatchers, railcar loaders, railcar mechanics, switchmen, track workers and depot attendants, without whom passenger toilets would back up). Then there are depot and workshop jobs (hostlers, repairmen, carpenters and factory workers, to name a few). Ukrzaliznytsia does its own laundry, it has its own glass factory, a carriage factory, a steel-rail rolling factory and another factory that cuts the rails to size. There are railway schools for children, vocational schools, summer camps, sanitariums and hospitals. The 15,000 miles of tracks are government-run and controlled from the center, including stations, depots and factories. Ukraine’s passenger and freight railways are grouped into six regional branches. In the first days of the invasion, the command cell held a call every hour with the heads of the six branches to gather information using an old Soviet-era technology, a closed-circuit system called a selector. The six branch heads then held their own selector calls with subordinates to collect information. Each regional branch has an average of four directorates, and each directorate has 50 to 100 railway stations, which also held their own calls. Selector call after selector call, information made its way up to Kamyshin from all over the country. Because many traffic controllers and safety officers live along the tracks, Ukrzaliznytsia knew how many tanks passed the border, how many helicopters were landing and how many paratroopers had arrived. Rail workers literally counted parachutes on the tracks. Kamyshin could follow the Russian military’s progress in real time based on when it passed particular stations, and he told me that he fed the information to the military. On Feb. 25, Russia hit Ukrzaliznytsia’s reserve command center with a cruise missile, but for the most part, the network avoided large-scale damage. The Kremlin was running a limited-strike campaign and did not actively target critical rail infrastructure, like bridges and train yards, because they assumed they would quickly take control of the country and depend on the same infrastructure. Ukrainians believed that because the Russians were relying on railways, too, they could safely gather people at stations for evacuation. The command cell quickly made two decisions. First, all passenger trains would transition to evacuation mode: They would be free, with no tickets required, and as many people as possible would be allowed to board. Second, they would run at slower speeds, which would help limit the scope of the damage if the Russians struck a train or near a track. Ukrzaliznytsia would try to preserve the life it could. Every day, the group drafted an evacuation train schedule that went live at 9 p.m. for the next day, posting it on their website as well as their Telegram and Facebook feeds. The railway had to juggle carriage, locomotive and track capacity: If one day the stationmaster in Kharkiv predicted they would need 42,000 people evacuated, they had to find enough trains to move 42,000 people. They checked nearby stations and depots; they looked at cities where the flow of passengers had decreased and brought trains headed there back to Kharkiv. The goal was to have no one sleep on the platform in the city closest to the Russian border. The state monopoly learned to be nimble and adapt to wartime footing. The rail-cutting factory started making tank-stopping “hedgehogs,” welding rails together into three-pronged jacks. When protests in smaller towns erupted, demanding that people be evacuated because they couldn’t get to the bigger cities, Kamyshin realized he would have to find the carriages to send trains there, too. Ukrzaliznytsia was not immune to criticism. In the chaotic first days, videos surfaced of foreigners, mostly African and Asian students, being prevented from boarding the trains. Human Rights Watch collected testimonies that “revealed a pattern” of blocking foreign students from evacuating. Attendants I spoke to said that in their experience, they had been prioritizing mothers, children and the elderly, but the testimonies and reports showed an uncomfortable reality of life in Ukraine and left a stain on an otherwise remarkable effort. As millions of people moved west, trains were returning empty. Volunteers began asking if they could fill the carriages with humanitarian goods — boxes of medicine, food supplies, baby formula, diapers — so Ukrzaliznytsia opened the carriages for free transport of aid. Later, Ukrzaliznytsia standardized the process with the Ukrainian postal service, attaching dedicated railcars to trains. Since then, they have distributed more than 140,000 tons of food, at least 300,000 tons of cargo and carried over three million parcels of mail. For a country that has skillfully mastered the Western media narrative — from promoting Zelensky’s famous leaked phrase “I need ammunition, not a ride” to the ubiquitous Snake Island slogan “Russian warship, go [expletive] yourself” — the railway’s triumph quickly became another public relations boon and a morale booster. In mid-March, when the prime ministers of Poland, the Czech Republic and Slovenia visited Kyiv, they came by rail. At that time, the capital was a ghost town — its broad boulevards were empty, sandbagged and knotted with checkpoints. The city’s silence was pierced only by air-raid sirens, winding up slowly and then wailing at full volume. The citizens who remained were on edge. Kamyshin was nervous but organized the trip. It was so successful that dignitaries and celebrities — including Boris Johnson, Nancy Pelosi, Anthony Blinken, Emmanuel Macron, Justin Trudeau, Angelina Jolie, Sean Penn and Annie Leibowitz — have taken a “secret” diplomatic train, posting selfies from the luxurious carriages. Kamyshin has named it #IronDiplomacy. (Because of security concerns, however, The New York Times barred its journalists from traveling by train after the invasion.) As the war progressed, Ukraine and Russia each used the railways to further their attacks and bolster their defenses. “Rail is really important from a logistics position,” says Rob Lee, senior fellow in the Foreign Policy Research Institute’s Eurasia Program. Russia’s reliance on artillery barrages makes the railways particularly valuable. “For a lot of the fighting, it was often a matter of which side was firing more artillery rounds a day. Quantity really mattered a lot, and that comes down to logistics, not just how many rounds can each type of artillery fire a day, but how much artillery can you get to each position — what is the logistics network like?” In April, when Russia abandoned hope of a seamless takeover, the Kremlin changed course and began targeting critical infrastructure: electrical substations, fuel depots, train stations and railway bridges. When Russian missiles hit five electrical substations in the west of the country, 19 trains were temporarily suspended. In June, missiles struck routes in the Carpathian Mountains. Fifteen trains were delayed for up to 10 hours. As Ukraine liberated occupied territory in the Kharkiv and Donbas regions over the summer and fall, the rails again became crucial strategic prizes: Each recaptured junction made it harder for Russia to resupply its remaining forces. “All you have to do is look at a map, the problems are very obvious,” says Michael Kofman, director of the Russia Studies Program at the Center for Naval Analyses. “Access to supplies by rail made a real difference in the Russian ability to sustain offensive operations.” In October, an explosion that hit a train carrying fuel caused the partial collapse of the Kerch Strait Bridge linking the Crimean Peninsula and Russia. (Ukraine has not publicly claimed credit for the strike.) “This has a direct effect on Russia’s ability to move forces or supplies back and forth across the Kerch Strait Bridge, and that line kept supplying the bulk of Russian force in the south,” Kofman says. Whenever the Ukrainian military pushed Russians out of occupied towns and villages, Ukrzaliznytsia was never far behind. Workers immediately began trying to re-establish the network even when there was still active combat. “We have a rule: Our tanks go in first, followed by our trains,” Kamyshin told me. “Once our troops reclaim our territory, our job is to restore rail service there as quickly as possible.” Unrelenting assaults had forced Ukrzaliznytsia to work under fire and in record speed. Repairs that would have taken a year took weeks or months. The Kyiv School of Economics estimated that by mid-September, Russians had damaged $4.3 billion in railway-station infrastructure and rolling stock. Across the north and east, Ukrzaliznytsia had restored service to more than a dozen liberated stations since the start of the invasion. In early November, they brought passengers to Kupyansk in the Kharkiv region a month after it was freed. The important railroad junction was one of the first cities to be overrun in the invasion. Occupation authorities had attempted to introduce Russian passports and changes in school curriculums. Because the Russians blew up the bridge connecting two sides of the city as they fled, the first passengers to return disembarked the train and crossed the river by pontoon. “When we return passenger traffic, people can move easily and we have an opportunity to supply humanitarian aid there on a large scale — it would take a long time to bring it in any other way,” Kamyshin said. “It is also an opportunity to bring in cargo traffic, and this is the economy, the lifeblood, of any war.” Kamyshin does not comment on the use of trains for military transport, but analysts believe Ukraine also relies heavily on the railway network to resupply its own troops. Attacks have killed scores of civilians. In April, a missile strike on a crowded platform in eastern Kramatorsk station killed 60 and wounded 111, and a rocket attack on Ukraine’s Independence Day on Aug. 24 on a train station in Chaplyne in eastern Ukraine killed 25 and wounded dozens more. Ukrzaliznytsia employees have become heroes: On March 20, the prime minister presented 20 railway workers with awards for “courage and heroism” under wartime conditions. Twenty-four hours later, Kamyshin ran into one of them, back at work in the Kharkiv depot, fixing the electricity grid under shelling, still wearing the same sweater. By Nov. 1, 19 Ukrzaliznytsia workers had been killed while on the job. Thirty-eight had been injured. Ukrzaliznytsia’s Telegram channel, with 300,000 subscribers, popularized the hashtag #IronPeople. “The moment when you look at a photo of the G7 summit and realize eight out of 10 have already traveled by Ukrzaliznytsia trains this year, some even twice, and some even three times,” Kamyshin posted on Telegram. In recent weeks, the Kremlin has gone after Ukraine’s electrical grid, plunging Ukraine into rolling blackouts. “Half of our traffic is electric trains and electric locomotives, so when they hit energy infrastructure, we also suffer, but we’ve learned to deal with it, to repair it promptly and keep going,” Kamyshin told me. “We’ve prepared our stations so that when the power, water or anything else in the city and in the regions goes out, we can continue to operate. The station will always be light and always be warm.” The first passenger train to arrive in Ukraine came, perhaps fittingly, from the West: A line linking Lviv to Krakow was completed in 1861. Western Ukraine, commonly called Galicia, was controlled by the Hapsburg empire, while central and eastern Ukraine belonged to the Russian empire. Russia’s humiliating defeat in the Crimean War propelled it to launch an ambitious reform and industrialization effort, particularly regarding the rail system. In 1865, the Russian empire completed its first railroad in present day Ukraine, connecting the port city Odesa to the southwestern agrarian town Balta to transfer grain from the heartland for export to Europe. At the time, Ukraine accounted for 75 percent of all exports from the Russian empire. “The railway in Ukraine before 1917 served almost exclusively Russian imperial — one can say colonial — interest, because the way railways were built and where lines actually led was a pretty colonialist enterprise,” Serhiy Bilenky, research associate at the Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies, says. “Resources were brought by train from Ukraine to Russia. Russia transported ready-made goods and a work force to Ukraine. Ukraine did not produce almost any ready-made goods or consumer goods.” By 1914, there were more than 10,000 miles of track crisscrossing Ukraine. During World War I, empires battled along train lines across the continent, destroying and rebuilding stations in Ukraine as they came and went. When Germany first occupied Kyiv in 1918, it hired local women to wash the main passenger station, to make a point about how backward and dirty the Russian empire was. During World War II, the Wehrmacht marched through Ukraine with such ferocious speed that it was practically impossible to flee. In the west, Lviv’s central station would change hands among the Poles, the Russians, the Nazis, back to the Russians, back to the Nazis again — and each time, the occupying army destroyed and rebuilt part of the rail system. In Kyiv and the east, trains were used for evacuation, but mostly for Soviet officials, those who worked on strategic enterprises and their immediate families. Unlike in the rest of Europe, the Nazis did not rely on trains to transport Jews in Ukraine to death camps. With the help of Ukrainian collaborators, they were shot close to their homes, often referred to as “holocaust by bullet.” When the Red Army retook Ukraine territory, the Kremlin utilized trains to reimpose Moscow’s authority. Stalin used trains for ethnic cleansing — the most infamous case was the Crimean Tatars in 1944, with roughly 200,000 deported over three days in cattle cars to Central Asia because they had “betrayed the motherland.” In 1945, Western Ukraine, which had never been under Moscow’s control before World War II, was officially incorporated into the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic. In 1954, Crimea was added to the republic, solidifying the country’s borders. At its height, the U.S.S.R.’s railroad network totaled 91,600 miles. It was among the largest in the world. It had its own ministry with as many as four million employees. Train attendants memorized all routes from Vladivostok to Tbilisi. A railway job was prestigious, not just because of the relatively higher salaries but because of the benefits that came with it. Generations went to work on the rails and proudly referred to themselves as “dynasties.” Many married one another and sent their children to railway technical and trade schools. In a Soviet society corrupted by nepotism and performative party loyalty, many believed it was the kind of career in which a person who applied themselves could truly advance. Russification, already predominant in urban areas of the center and east of Ukraine during the Russian empire, spread along the railway lines as more regions were integrated into the Soviet structure. Yet, the trains also inadvertently created space for the survival of a Ukrainian identity. As young people flocked to the cities for Soviet education in Russian, train travel was cheap enough that those same students often went home on the weekends to the villages where their parents lived and where Ukrainian was spoken. “Railways were the way to live in two worlds, one which was Sovietized and the other was not Sovietized,” Yaroslav Hrytsak, professor of history at the Ukrainian Catholic University, told me. “It was extremely important for building this kind of identity, not anti-Soviet, but non-Soviet identity — preserving this non-Soviet identity and memories.” After Ukraine’s independence in 1991, Kyiv painted green Soviet carriages blue and redesigned the uniforms and epaulets, but little else changed. Ukrzaliznytsia’s six regional branches still don’t bear Ukrainian names or orientations — their directions only make sense when viewed from Moscow: The “southern branch” is actually in the center of Ukraine, while the “southwestern branch” is geographically in the north of the country. Ukrzaliznytsia was restructured but never privatized, the railroad degraded, and the chief executive position became a political post, given out to curry oligarch favor. “It was so common to choose someone who had no idea how railways work, people even started to joke about it,” Mykola Kopylov, editor in chief of Rail Insider, a Ukrainian industry publication, told me. In 2000, Heorhiy Kirpa was appointed head of Ukrzaliznytsia. His bronze bust still adorns the outer wall of Ukrzaliznytsia headquarters in downtown Kyiv. Under Kirpa, Ukrzaliznytsia embarked on an ambitious reconstruction program, renovating dozens of railway stations while maintaining travel services. He started the first express trains, added more electric trams and put down the country’s first fiber-optic cables along the tracks. He supposedly got kickbacks on the procurement of new equipment — and he bought a lot of new equipment. (Did the country’s national railway really need to buy batteries for the Ukrainian submarine Zaporizhzhia?) A staunch supporter of Viktor Yanukovych, the Kremlin-favored politician from Eastern Ukraine whose theft of the 2004 presidential election set off the Orange Revolution, Kirpa died of mysterious circumstances that year. His death was officially ruled a suicide, but many were skeptical. Since his reign, few have held the post for more than a year. In 2014, Ukrainians staged what became known as the Euromaidan protests, toppling Yanukovych after he bowed to Russian pressure and halted plans for an economic alignment agreement with the European Union. Fueled by Russian propaganda — as well as decades of cynical Ukrainian government policy that drummed up votes on the back of historic regional grievances between East and West and manufactured language divisions between native Russian and Ukrainian speakers — separatists in the east of the country took over cities in the Donetsk and Luhansk regions. Russian soldiers without insignia, meanwhile, stormed Crimea. At the time, there were no organized evacuation trains for citizens, and people in the Donbas had to make their own way to Ukrainian-controlled territory. Slowly, train service between the Crimea, Donetsk and Luhansk and Ukraine just stopped. “This happened as the infrastructure collapsed,” Oleksandr Nosulko, the director of the Donetsk branch, told me. “These were the trains that never returned.” Before Russia annexed Crimea, Ukraine had never really developed a civic identity. The U.S.S.R. had designated ethnicities on internal passports — “Ukrainian” “Russian” and “Jewish” to name a few — and since independence, Kyiv had done little to integrate the communities. To be Ukrainian from the country rather than belonging to the ethnic nation was a concept that only slightly took root after the Euromaidan. Trains had been one of the few places where regional and ethnic stereotypes were challenged, where identity and civic understanding were formed. Ukraine is one of the poorest countries in Europe. Most Ukrainians still travel around by rail, which is old and slow, leaving plenty of time to chat or drink with your neighbor. “Ukrzaliznytsia, it’s like a social glue,” Volodymyr Kulyk, head research fellow at the Institute of Political and Ethnic Studies at the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine, told me. “It’s really something that connects different parts of Ukraine, and brings together people with different backgrounds, different languages with different financial means. People need to know people from other parts of the country to feel they have something in common with them.” In April 2019, Zelensky was elected on promises to rid the country of corruption. In the years that followed, Ukrzaliznytsia chief executives came and went. In 2021, Kamyshin took the helm, and in November and December of that year, Ukrzaliznytsia carried a record amount of freight cargo and started running a profit again. It bought new carriages, wagons and locomotives and opened five passenger-train lines in smaller stations. Kamyshin had grand plans to continue modernization, to start electric high-speed trams and connect more of the country. Analysts I spoke to suggested that it was too early to say if Kamyshin would have succeeded or if this was yet another attempt at reform that would have been thwarted by the usual dark forces of Ukraine’s turbulent politics and oligarch-aligned economy. Zelensky was elected by the highest-ever percentage of votes, but in the days before the invasion, his approval rating was lower than it had ever been. As observers waited for the decrepit network to fall apart, its capabilities surprised even its most virulent critics. “I’m quite impressed that the railroads have functioned so well,” Anders Aslund, a Swedish economist who served on Ukrzaliznytsia’s supervisory board for two years before leaving in 2020 in protest of the lack of reforms, told me. “This is the advantage of backwardness.” In some ways, it was the state monopoly’s autocratic Soviet legacy that led to its unexpected wartime success. The things Kamyshin had been asked to change became an advantage. Ukraine had too many rail lines, making it possible to ferry goods and people on varying lines and reroute the trains quickly in the event of an attack. Because Ukrzaliznytsia had only electrified part of its rails, diesel-powered trains could still run when electrical substations were attacked. (Electrified rails are considered faster, cheaper and more environmentally sustainable, but diesel locomotives are more reliable in war.) Reformers complained there were far too many workers, but that also meant there was a surplus of engineers familiar with making repairs in tight economic conditions. Employees, used to top-down command structures, reported for work. I was visiting my parents in Miami when the invasion started. We spent my entire weeklong trip glued to the television. My mother, like my grandmother and her grandmother before her, was born within the borders of present-day Ukraine. None had an easy life there. We watched with a sense of powerlessness — a mix of horror, guilt, and an internal reckoning about post-Soviet identity and our family’s place in that nation’s history that we had been struggling with for so long. As the TV analysts proclaimed that much of Ukraine would be overrun in 72 hours, we surprised one another with our tears. Seeing the scenes at the stations, the horror, the inhumane crush of people trying to survive and those working around the clock to save them, I began to think about Ukraine’s railroad. Weeks before the Nazis marched into Kyiv, my 23-year-old grandmother was sneaked onto an evacuation train. Everyone else in my family who stayed in Kyiv was killed: either marched to Babyn Yar or rounded up by their neighbors and shot in the courtyard of their own building. I grew up with the knowledge that I was alive because of this small fortune — a story my family tells over and over again. I know how valuable it is to evacuate one life. How that life begets more lives, how Ukrzaliznytsia employees were saving generations, people they would never meet. Earlier this year, I spent five weeks driving around the country talking to Ukrzaliznytsia workers and volunteers in train stations in six cities. I believed the rail network perfectly encapsulated much of what I had been reporting on and off in Ukraine for a decade — all the things that had been right and wrong in the country even before the invasion. Afterward, the same network came to symbolize the remarkable aspects of Ukrainian devotion to their country and their determination to resist Russian attacks. I wanted to see life as it was lived on the rail and to witness the community it created in wartime in order to answer a question I have been asking for a long time: What does it mean to be Ukrainian? How many years does it take to shed the U.S.S.R., like a snake molting its skin? The invasion revealed a new kind of nationalism. The same politicians, highly placed civil servants and businessmen who previously thwarted aspirations of the newly democratic Ukrainian state were now fighting for their homeland. Many Ukrainians themselves were surprised by how quickly the country united. Some believed this unity was preordained. “We fight each other every day,” Yaroslav Krysko, a volunteer I met in Dnipro, told me, “but when there’s a problem, we band together, and then as soon as it’s over, we will go right back to fighting each other again.” All of Ukraine’s faults had been forgotten in the attacks — corruption, regional divisions, political infighting, sexism. How much of it would finally be put to rest by this war? How much of it was waiting somewhere, just out of view? Already there were whispers and accusations — about those who collaborated with Russian occupiers, those who fled when they should have stayed to fight. The trains bred their own culture. There was a predictable pattern to riding the rails: People got on, changed into their train clothes, ate food they had packed and slept at basically the same time, in easy consensus. On the train and in stations, people shared what little information they had. For that moment, they were together, constructing their own understandings of this war from a small tin tube of safety amid the chaos outside. Ukraine’s trains had always been slow, rocking people into a kind of warm, languid hypnosis. Home, after so many evacuations and deaths, had taken on a new meaning. From Kyiv, it is roughly a six-hour train ride east to Kharkiv, Ukraine’s second-largest city, which had borne the brunt of the initial invasion. And though Russia had been repelled from the center, at the end of May when I visited, the Russian Army continued to terrorize the population from just outside city limits, shooting rockets into leafy green parks in the center of town, lobbing mortar shells into residential buildings. Air-raid sirens blared constantly. The residents who remained lived in a perpetual twilight of war. Behind the grand, marbled Kharkiv train station, replete with murals of Soviet patriotism and vitality, there was a black, graffiti-covered decommissioned dining carriage serving as a lunchroom for all Ukrzaliznytsia employees who remained in the embattled city despite the Russian onslaught. Every weekday at noon, at the neon-green counter, three women who previously worked in a cafe in the station’s depot before it was shelled started ladling out a multicourse lunch — soup, a main with a side, along with compote, a fruit drink. Nearly a hundred Ukrzaliznytsia employees trooped in over the next two hours, picked up a tray, sat at a gray upholstered seat with a tray table and bantered about the mysterious pink sauce offered on the counter. In the next carriage, an ordinary second-class, blue-colored overnight sleeper, there were nine passenger compartments where Ukrzaliznytsia employees who lost their homes now lived — train attendants, a bogie repairman, a battery technician, a store woman, a handyman, a train-car inspector, a technical-security foreman and a married couple of equippers showed just how many people it took to make a railway work. Halyna Zhuravska, a train attendant, was the first to move into the carriage. Her train was standing in Kyiv station when the invasion began. Her town, Chuhuiv, 20 miles outside Kharkiv, was bombarded immediately, so she worked without a break for six weeks to evacuate people. “I didn’t have anywhere to go anyway,” she told me. “At least I could help people.” When it was clear she needed a home and some time off work, she was offered a place in the wagon. She chose a compartment far from the bathroom and built her own hanging light as decoration. She preferred to listen to audiobooks rather than socialize. Halyna graduated from Kharkiv National University with a degree in philology, Ukrainian language and literature. She took a summer job on the rails and dreamed of a life of adventure. At the time, she could ride free to any part of the Soviet Union — Kaliningrad, Vladivostok, Belarus, Crimea, Sochi, the Caucasus. “I loved it, it was like romance,” she told me. She built her own house, raised her children and kept to herself and her books. Now, she sent money to her daughter and grandson who fled to Norway when the invasion began. In Compartment 3, Liudmyla, a store woman, hosted her nephew and father — the family was debating whether to travel back to Slatyne, a town 18 miles north toward the Russian border, to collect their things and patch up the roof. Oleksii, a battery repairman in Compartment 4, who had lived a few blocks away in Slatyne, thought they were insane for trying. He had given up on going back. I asked Halyna and Oleksii what they did on their days off. Both told me they preferred to stay in the carriage, though they all knew its thin walls offered little protection from any attack. “I don’t want to roam the streets or be in open spaces,” Oleksii said. “I don’t know, maybe I already have some kind of phobia, but I’d rather just stay here. I’ll plug the phone into the phone charger, I’ll watch some TV series. That’s better.” At night, many of them sat outside the carriage on a little wooden bench, chatting and smoking. They had planted onions in a plastic tub, tended to them and watched the green shoots grow. In the dark, every night, they could see rockets and missiles streaking the sky. Yet, despite the risks in Kharkiv and towns close to the Russian border, residents were returning as the Ukrainian military pushed the Russians back (5,000 people per day when I was there). At the station, many waited on the platform with flowers. I watched an intercity train pull up from Kyiv, and a pair of young men fell into each other’s arms, the returnee, Oleh, in tears. Oleh was 19, tall, lanky and covered in tattoos. He had come back from the relative safety of western Ukraine because he couldn’t be away any longer. He set down a plastic picnic basket and communed with his cat. “That’s it, we are home! Home!” Oleh proclaimed, brushing back his hair and rubbing his eyes. I asked what he would do first. “I’m going to hug everything,” he said. “I just want to come home and hug everything.” The Pokrovsk junction in the Donbas region — with a locomotive depot, railway-car depot, power-supply station, track-repair station and signal-communication station — had been hit by at least two airstrikes. The first time the Russians damaged the tracks; the second time, the tracks and catenary wires. Another night, a cluster bomb exploded above the sorting station. Emergency services did their best to clear the area, but because it was snowing, they missed a mine. When the snow melted, one of the rail repairmen stepped on it and was struck with shrapnel; he later died from blood loss. Before Feb. 24, Dmytro Vakulenko, the junction stationmaster, was in charge of 360 workers. After the attacks, there were 80. “Our workers are also people, and after the railways as well as the station itself were hit by the rockets, they evacuated together with their families,” he said. When we met in May, Pokrovsk was only 20 miles from the front lines. It was the first stop of the only free evacuation train going west. Most of the beige-tiled station’s windows were boarded up. The ones that remained were sandbagged, but the glass still danced with the faint booms of shelling in the distance. Ukrzaliznytsia employees had started to trickle back even as the frontline pushed closer toward them. When Dmytro became stationmaster at 26, he was one of the youngest in the country. His grandfather worked on railcar assembly, his grandmother was a signalwoman, his father worked the rails and so does his wife. The dread of the frontline approaching was palpable in Pokrovsk, but for Dmytro, it seemed he would lose not just his work but the way of life that defined him and his family. He couldn’t imagine leaving. “I am scared to lose the station,” he told me. “I am scared to realize it’s under occupation or destroyed. I must have walked every part of it a thousand times.” No one in Donetsk Oblast had to look far to see their nightmare reflected back to them. Svitlana Kravtsova had been the head of the passenger terminal in Popasna — a smaller town 67 miles away — for 20 years. As fighting intensified, the last passenger train left the station on March 2, but Svitlana remained. Even during heavy street fighting, she walked the seven minutes from her house to survey the station and file a daily damage report. There were times when it was too dangerous to go outside, but on the days she made it to the station, Svitlana and some of her female colleagues tried to salvage what they could. “The things that we could save, we saved,” she told me over tea with Dmytro in her temporary office on the second floor of the Pokrovsk passenger station. “Can you imagine our houseplants, plants this big” — she spread her arms wide — “freezing? There is no way we would leave them there.” “This is certainly women’s logic,” Dmytro interrupted. They laughed. “This is exactly what we were doing, Dmytro Volodymyrovych,” she addressed him respectfully, with his patronymic. “We are women, so we saved what we could and hid what we could not save. But we stopped when we realized it was not safe and basically not possible. The conditions were inhumane. I made my final decision to leave when I came to see the station and realized that we won’t be able to restore the station by ourselves. We needed heavy machinery and peace. To do that with the ongoing 24/7 attacks it was impossible. After that, I left.” By the time we met, she had been officially transferred to a post at Pokrovsk. Popasna station is cratered with mortar fire. Her father’s and her relatives’ houses are all gone. “We love our jobs, but we are also scared like other people are,” Dmytro tried to explain. “Only the stupid ones are not scared. We both clearly understand that any minute can be fatal, but we still have to do our job. “It is not an easy thing to leave everything behind and start doing something else you do not have any experience in,” he continued. “I do not want all of my hard work to become useless. I think Svitlana Borysivna would say the same.” “I cannot imagine my life without passengers,” Svitlana echoed. “And he can’t live without freight cars.” Across the Ukrzaliznytsia, rail workers were incredulous when I brought up fleeing. Why would they leave when their country needed them to stay? No one wanted to be called brave outright; they were all just doing their jobs. Though they may have been initially drawn to the work for different reasons — family history, a sense of adventure or sheer economics — the railway had become a kind of religion. The pay had not kept up with the times and the job had lost prestige and many of its previous benefits, but this war had made the Ukrzaliznytsia workers proud of being called #IronPeople. After the April attack on Kramatorsk station, Ukrzaliznytsia decided Pokrovsk was the safest place in Donbas to gather a large group of people for evacuation. The company started pulling brigades from different bases to work the evacuation route. In the early days of the invasion, Tetiana Vislohuzova, a rules examiner in the Dnipro office, agreed to return to working as a director of an evacuation train as soon as she was asked. She left the relative safety of the main office for the danger of the rails. “The first time I went on an emergency train, I said, ‘Give me a bulletproof vest, a helmet, just in case,’” she told me. “They smiled and said, ‘What helmet, what bulletproof vest?’” Tetiana also worked on a medical train taking the wounded from the Kramatorsk station attack. In a partnership between Ukrzaliznytsia and Doctors Without Borders, two trains had been retrofitted for medical use, one as a mobile intensive-care unit. Doors had been widened for stretchers and compartments fitted with equipment, staffed by doctors and Ukrzaliznytsia attendants in shifts. The train’s routes aren’t publicized because of their proximity to the frontline. Nothing prepared Tetiana for the violence she saw on that route. She helped a mother with a baby whose arm was torn off. Then there was Yana, an 11-year-old who weighed only 60 pounds. The staff carried her into the train in their arms. A rocket had taken her legs. When Tetiana walked into their compartment, she heard Yana’s mother trying to calm her. “Yanochka, everything will be OK! Everything will be done for you! They will fix your legs, the doctor says they’ll get you heels and you will dance!” Tetiana turned to look at Yana’s mother, wanting to see this strong woman with such a confident voice. She looked down and saw the attack had taken one of the mother’s legs too. As Russia loses territory, there is a persistent anxiety that Putin will do something to offset his military’s initial failings. People fear an escalation. Anything can happen — a chemical or nuclear attack. Across the country, the train system has taken on roles it never has before — feeding, sheltering and providing trauma counseling and first aid for the masses. Ukrzaliznytsia continues to rely on the citizens who rally around it. In Dnipro, the second stop of the evacuation train, 100 miles west of Pokrovsk, through the doors of a former shopping plaza, catty-cornered to the Dnipro passenger-train station, the Mother and Child Center accepted evacuating mothers with children and invalids. The center sprang up spontaneously in March. Volunteers, seeing the mothers and children waiting in lines outside the station, thought there should be a place for them to rest. Coordinating with the mayor and the stationmaster, they developed a system under which those needing assistance could be taken straight from the center to the train platform to pre-board, avoiding the crowds at the station. They could stay up to two nights. Dnipro was no stranger to wartime chaos and evacuations. The Russian-speaking eastern city of one million had long been a large railroad junction, sitting between the Donetsk coal basin and the Kryvyi Rih iron-ore basin. During the Soviet era, it was home to a secret ballistic-missile plant and was closed to foreigners until 1987. In 2014, the city was expected to be the next in line to fall to separatists after Donetsk, but instead, it remained resoundingly committed to being part of Ukraine. As a result of being the closest city to the newly declared separatist republics, internally displaced Ukrainians streamed into Dnipro. This iteration of the war was no different. The city was a funnel for citizens fleeing to areas that remained under Ukrainian control. In the shopping mall, the volunteers had taken over the ground floor. Roughly 80 of them worked in three shifts. Evacuees arrived at all hours. Initially, there were around 2,000 every day; at the end of May, there were about 200. Food was brought twice a day by World Central Kitchen. Hot meals — soup, porridge and meat — were available any time. Boxes of boiled eggs, sandwiches and some vegetables were given out for breakfast or taken on the train. People were transported to the center by volunteer organizations, often church groups or other nongovernmental groups, or hired drivers. They came in vans, cars or buses. (Numbers surged again in June and have fluctuated since, depending on the course of the war.) “People have spent a long time in basements before the evacuation and have not eaten hot food for a long time,” Odarka Bila, director of the department of youth policy and national-patriotic education for the Dnipro City Council, told me as she showed me around. There was a separate room for mothers with babies to rest, with changing tables, baby food, formula and diapers of varying sizes. Everything was free. The center distributed potties and strollers from a stockpile of donations. Along a wall, there was a section for people to pick up secondhand clothes and shoes. Cots lined two rooms, and Ukrzaliznytsia-branded linens were changed daily. (Through a partnership, the railway launders the center’s linens.) At the back of the sleeping room, there was a small exhibition of photographs and cheerful children’s drawings next to a large play area staffed with volunteers. Twice a day, preschool teachers came to do crafts. Toys lined the walls, and children were allowed to take what they wanted. “In the beginning, it was very difficult, because when the weather was bad, when it rained, people came just in slippers and walked through puddles, practically barefoot,” Odarka said. “There are a lot of wounded people coming in, so we also asked for crutches. It is not from foundations, ordinary people brought them to us, and we give them to those who need them. Here we have wheelchairs. “There are a lot of people who do not walk well, who do not walk at all,” she continued. “We have padded stretchers; before we used to carry people on blankets.” Every day around 6 p.m., Yaroslav Krysko, the deputy director of the department of ecological policy for the Dnipro City Council, began walking between the cots in the darkened room, shouting: “I’m making a list for the evacuation train! It stops in Ternopil! Vinnytsia! Khmelnytskyi! Give me one name per family. We are gathering at the entrance at 7:20!” Some gave their names eagerly, others appeared wary. They approached with all kinds of questions; most wondered where they should go. Yarolsav referred them to a government website called You Are Welcome Here that tracked available housing around the country. But with 6.2 million internally displaced people in all of Ukraine — nearly a fifth of the country, the largest human displacement in Europe today — the cities were full, though there was space in the countryside. What will we do for work there? No one could answer. Each night at the Dnipro train station, on Platform 1, the same volunteers follow the same script: Yaroslav shouted for everyone to stand to the side, to wait, to walk, to stand to the side, to wait, to walk, to board, to stop pushing. One night, we walked Yevheniya, a blind older woman from Bakhmut, to a train west. I watched as Dave Young, a British volunteer who had been living in Ukraine for 16 years, brought her to the center the day before. Dave volunteered with a group of drivers who slept in Dnipro and drove east every day to collect people who wanted to evacuate. He told me that Yevheniya had what drivers called the “Bakhmut burn” — the smell of those who didn’t have water to bathe and lived in smoke from bombardments — but was in relatively good spirits. The volunteer group gave him locations for pickups, but sometimes those fell through and he just drove around Donbas towns asking if anyone needed a ride out. Someone in Bakhmut had directed him to Yevheniya. He placed her in a van and then loaded three other evacuees: an intellectually disabled young woman, her grandmother and her drunken brother. (Dave later lost an eye on another evacuation when his car came under attack. He is still driving.) Yevheniya spent the night in the center waiting for a train that would take her to a town in central Ukraine, where she had friends. Yaroslav held one arm, a teacher named Tanya held the other. Step by step they walked her to the platform, describing every dip in the pavement, every stair. They spoke about the champagne factory that had been destroyed in Bakhmut, how beautiful it had been, how sweet Soviet wine was. Tanya suggested Yevheniya try to reach Germany, where she thought they could perform an operation to restore her sight. Yevheniya said she was fine as she was. It started to drizzle, and we all walked in the mist. They led her into the carriage, helped her sit on the bunk that would be hers. They stored her bag, arranged her bedding and took her photo to show Dave she had made it safely. “We have no right to show our emotions,” Yaroslav told me. “We have to support people. Be like a wall. And first of all, show these people that they are under our protection, they are safe and we are doing everything we can to make them feel safe. That is our main task.” As we walked back, I thought about Yevheniya’s safety, about the work, all the volunteers and Ukrzaliznytsia employees that overlapped with one another, the energy that went into saving just one life. Sarah A. Topol is a contributing writer for the magazine. Her work has won a National Magazine Award as well as an Overseas Press Club Award, among others. She previously wrote about the pro-democracy movement in Belarus. Adam Ferguson is an Australian photographer based in New York. He is currently working on two monographs — a war diary about his time in Afghanistan and a contemporary portrait of Australia’s colonial legacy. Advertisement
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· beautiful keyboard, but the new form of synthesis doesn’t sound groundbreaking, quite cheesy actually if we’re to judge by these examples · I’m using mine as a second voice ( via MIDI ) to my Medusa in a live drone setup, and let me tell you, it really complements the Medusa. It’s so much fun tweaking both whilst a set of notes are held,… · The sound in the video ist not particularly impressive. No reason to believe this is anything more than a $2 condenser capsule in trendy colored plastic housings.. There are numerous superior quality…
