Benya Stewart has today released his new album titled ‘About Oblivion’. Having spent much of his recent past in Ukraine and seeing firsthand some of the things that have been going on there, Benya takes inspiration into motion in his evolution of revolution with ten songs of resilience and the importance of music to both the mind and the spirit.
There is no way I can accurately or effectively write about the war in Ukraine. I’m as distant in experience as I am in mileage. I’ve heard from people who write better than I that our best selves are found at the edge of the abyss. To say the Ukrainians are heroes is something not only always said but also can’t be said enough. Based on that, I feel that ‘About Oblivion’ is a set of ten timestamps. Moments in time lived, learned, loved, lost, and sometimes, left. Benya feels like the perfect person to convey what is being conveyed in ‘About Oblivion’.
“Something I’ve learned during my time in Ukraine is that music, and the arts generally, are anything but trivial. Anyone who thinks so has not been subjected to tragedy. In times of war, music can function like the backbone of the people’s spirit; I see this reality every day. I’ve never experienced so many powerful moments of groups of friends and strangers joined together in song. Through this strange time and place, I have received the unspeakably strong insight that music is an indispensable tool for the survival of a soul in duress.
“About Oblivion” is a snapshot of the last year and a half of exploring Ukraine together, seeing the grief and challenge and richness and connection with people of all stripes who live in the shadow of war. It is a snapshot of our lives as artists making art, despite air alarms, drone and missile attacks, and the loss of so much precious life.”
Benya Stewart
About Benya Stewart
My name is Benya Stewart, and I’m a singer/songwriter from the hills of southeastern Ohio. In a strange twist of fate, I found myself pulled towards Ukraine several years before Russia’s full-scale invasion. Now I’ve wound up living in Kyiv, working as a teacher for two years now, and building a musical career across the pond.
The new album “About Oblivion” will capture a lot of the energy that has been swirling about these last few years: it’s about love lost, the grief and cruelty of war, and an attempt to maintain some humanity in a world hellbent on depriving us of it.
“About Oblivion” is the first release from me and my partner, Olha Sterneichuk. Olha, or “Helga Stern,” as is her online moniker, is a Ukrainian folk singer from a small town located between Kyiv and Odesa. The land down there is a bit like the American Great Plains—rich and fertile, but very quiet, and the flatness stretches on for what seems like an eternity. She grew up singing with her grandmother in a church setting, and singing has provided her a lot of comfort and refuge over the course of her life.
To me, our sound falls into the category of indie-folk. In many ways, it is a classic, timeless sound: male and female vocals mixing over the top of an acoustic guitar, and a cello filling in the voids with a rich wash of emotion. We have attempted to create something graceful and sensitive, made with careful attention to detail tempered by a desire for something raw and unfiltered.
Our duo has been very influenced by the fact that we’ve already performed all over Ukraine, at small festivals, at mental health retreats, at bars and restaurants, at residency centers in the mountains, and even in the south and east, closer to active combat, where we’ve performed for kids in shelters and for recovering veterans.
About Oblivion features the boundless creativity of Volo Bedzvin, a cellist based in Lviv, Ukraine. Volo works as a studio musician for many different groups and singers, and is himself a songwriter and composer, and audio engineer to boot.
I’ve been performing with Volo ever since my first trip to Lviv in January 2020. He is an incredibly intuitive musician and artist, and his cello feels more like a third voice than a second instrument. While he’s not a permanent member of our band, given certain technical difficulties of living in different cities, he’s an integral part of our musical life and project, and we are so lucky that he joined us for this project.
The seed of all this was to give myself time and space to explore my own songwriting, and to build up my own repertoire of folk and original songs. After many years of performing in different folk bands and collaborations (Hill Spirits, Chivalrous Crickets, and the Sandy Tar Stringband), moving to Kyiv gave me a great opportunity to explore solo performance. And, in so doing, I began to receive great feedback—at least enough to encourage myself to dust off some of my songs that had been waiting for their time.
But performing with others—the interaction between two or more creative minds—this is really the special magic to me, and something to which I’m happily addicted. Even though there’s something beautiful and pragmatic about the life of a solo musician, it felt lonely and exposed. I wanted to find someone I could sing with, someone with whom I could craft intricate harmonies and sing with both power and sensitivity.
Our story is that we met at a traditional singing event here in Ukraine, in the Poltava region east of Kyiv. Ukrainians have an incredibly rich tradition of folk singing, and our shared passion for this ancient, precious repertoire is something that connected us immediately.
At the root of our sound is the merging and mixture of two very different traditions: those of the Appalachian foothills and the central plains of Ukraine. We both came to our own traditions pretty late—just as we were turning 20 or so—so we both had already been steeping in other sorts of sounds.
Since beginning the project, Olha and I have gone on nearly thirty small tours around Ukraine. We have a ritual of walking twenty minutes to the train station from our apartment, sometimes at the crack of dawn, sometimes late at night, to catch a sleeper train.
Last June, we went on a weeklong tour of de-occupied Ukraine, meaning the region that Russian troops were fully expelled from in the summer of 2023. The people there are still recovering, of course, and the land and villages are all deeply wounded. We organized the whole tour in partnership with a non-profit based in Kharkiv, and brought along an up-and-coming Ukrainian band called Pyrig I Batig. Together we went on a “de-occupation tour” of this region, performing for the civilians in small towns, and sharing many hugs and tears.
Benya Stewart
SOURCE: Official Bio
LINKS:
https://www.instagram.com/benya.stewart
https://www.benyastewart.com/
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCIUIl4QqdTHUop9517gQsuw