This was also the starting point for two of Alexis Kochan’s most enduring musical partnerships: bandurist and sopilka player Julian Kytasty, and violist and singer-songwriter Richard Moody. These two bards from different cultural worlds would go on to shape the sound of Paris To Kyiv for years to come. Variances fused their distinct influences with the rhythmic counterpoints of African percussionist Evans Coffie and Henry Zacharias, building a musical terrain that felt both ancient and experimental.

The album combined pre-Christian ritual songs, fragments of medieval chant, and traditional village dance music—reimagined with modern expression. The juxtaposition might have seemed contradictory, but spiritually it felt correct. It was timeless. And it gave me a conceptual foothold as I began to develop the visual direction.

The cover was my first opportunity to introduce symbolic storytelling to the project. The colour palette was drawn from “Stone Age Carol,” one of the album’s oldest songs, where ancient symbolism flips modern associations: black represents the fertile earth—life—while white, the colour of sun-bleached bone, signifies death. That inversion became the foundation for the packaging. And it wouldn’t be the last time we’d return to this rhythm—black and white, exterior and interior, old meanings recast in new form.

On the outside, the visuals are dark and symbolic. Inside, they give way to quiet white panels with understated typography. The contrast between interior and exterior reflects the broader tension between old and new, ritual and reason.

The cover features a black-and-white photograph of a three-branched свечник (candleholder). The two outer candles have been recently extinguished—their smoke curling upward in perfectly mirrored trails—while the center candle remains lit, its flame undisturbed. The symmetry of the smoke suggests continuity and duality: past and future, old world and new world, pagan and Christian, body and spirit. It’s a moment frozen between extinguishing and illumination. That visual tension became a guiding principle for the rest of the design.

On the back, a grid of photographic vignettes extends the visual language without relying on cliché. A nail. A dead tree. A grotto missing its icon. A surreal image of Alexis with her shadow’s hand raised in a gesture of blessing, while her real hands rest silently in her lap. A moment of total eclipse. In isolation, each image may seem incongruent. But in context, they align.

That caravan included returning collaborators Julian Kytasty and Richard Moody, alongside British multi-instrumentalist Martin Colledge, whose Celtic influences helped define the album’s tone. Newcomer Nenad Zdjelar, a Serbian contrabassist, joined the ensemble as the percussionists from the previous recording stepped away. The resulting sound was expansive and dynamic—ranging from spare two-part vocal harmonies to lush ensemble arrangements of ritual songs that moved through the rhythms of the earth and sky, life and afterlife, season by season. English translations by the team of Virlana Tkacz and Wanda Phipps extended the project’s reach without diluting its cultural grounding.

Visually, the work began with feeling. The music evoked landscape. The caravan suggested distant paths—connecting the Ukrainian steppes to the Canadian prairie. That image became a canvas: a surreal oil painting of Alexis as a transparent figure holding a peacock feather that curls toward the sky. Alexis once described the project as “travelling through distant times and places.” That image—part apparition, part oracle—was my response to that idea. The “eye” of the feather becomes the moon—a gesture linking the human life cycle to the celestial phases above. A visual symbol of continuity, movement, and transformation.

One promotional image brought all these elements into a single frame: a modern photograph of Alexis seated in a Wassily chair by Marcel Breuer, in front of the very painting that would become the album’s cover and back. A moment where history and modernity met—quietly, confidently, through art.

That image would be featured prominently across a series of tour posters, postcards, and print ads—becoming a visual thread that tied together the album’s symbolic language, its design treatment, and the ensemble’s public presence.

It was a carefully curated expression of the project’s evolving identity—pointing both inward, to its cultural and symbolic roots, and outward, to new audiences and places the music was about to travel.

I created a small campaign to support the shows and point audiences to the website. The line Ukrainian song, new world variant became a touchstone. The poster and postcard designs emulated the look and feel of a 17th-century artifact—complete with archaic glyphs, acquisition stamps, and aged textures—like something newly unearthed. A mix of English, Polish, and Ukrainian Cyrillic expressed the ensemble’s multilingual identity in an effortless way—without needing to translate every word. The balance of languages reflected the tone of the music itself.

The costume I envisioned for Alexis was created specifically for the tour poster: a tall wool hat and long coat, photographed in a distressed industrial space. A modern relic. It’s interesting to note that several members of a fledgling Ukrainian act were in the audience at the Dakh Theatre in Kyiv during the ensemble’s performance. They would go on to form the band DakhaBrakha—adopting a similar aesthetic and achieving international success. A perfect loop: old world influencing new world, influencing old world.

The artwork for Fragmenti began with a single form: the poppy pod. Traditionally symbolic of both fertility and remembrance, the poppy in Ukrainian culture also carries associations with grief, conflict, and transformation. But rather than depict the lush flower, the paintings in this package strip the poppy down to its barest, most evocative state—a seed pod waiting to bloom. A form of potential, held in stasis. The design unfolded as a triptych of original paintings, each revealing a different facet of the human condition—rooted in potential, layered with memory, and resolved through resilience and renewal.

Painting 1 – The first painting appears on the cover, illustrated in a folk-naive style but layered with surreal symbolism. A single poppy pod floats in space—opened just enough to reveal what’s held within. We see an unborn child: a symbol of the next generation. A generation shaped not only by what was lost, but by what still survives. And here, the poppy becomes a symbol for the culture itself, held in stasis but with the potential to bloom. Suspended between rupture and renewal. The image is inset within an embossed square—its own kind of window—framed on the stark white sleeve like a reliquary. An invitation to look closer, and to consider what lies inside.

Painting 2 – The second painting cuts deeper—both visually and symbolically. Its square aperture reveals not anatomy, but a kind of cultural cross-section. Are we seeing a spine, or a sopilka? A diagram of the body, or of the music itself? Lines radiate outward and inward, pointing to half-lost words, untranslated texts, fragments of knowledge. It’s a visual map of how meaning travels: between generations, between languages, between memory and reinvention.

Papaver natorum (n. sp.)
Family: Papaveraceae
Common name: Child’s Poppy (alt. “Poppy of Children”) Found along thresholds—of ritual, renewal and cultural rebirth.

Painting 3 – The third and final painting shifts to silhouette—an abstracted poppy pod, reduced to form and flame. Here, we don’t look inside. Instead, we feel what surrounds it: a crown of thorns, a field of fire. The image evokes suffering, yes—but also transformation. A nod to the burning heart of Christian iconography, reimagined here as a symbol of cultural endurance. What survives hardship is often what’s most essential. And what burns can sometimes illuminate.

Together, the three paintings form a journey: from potential, to memory, to resilience. Each one marking a threshold—personal, cultural, and timeless.

The physical design reinforces the album’s themes. A rigid casebook format wraps around matte-black interior boards—an inversion of the colour story used in Variances, where black cloaked the outside and white lined the inside. This reversal signals a shift in emotional terrain: one where light surrounds the dark—and in this world, what’s most vital is held inside.

No plastic was used. The CD rests in a custom paper sleeve, held friction-tight. The 12-page booklet pairs Ukrainian lyrics with spare English “essences” rather than direct translations. These fragments mirror the musical approach: poetic, partial, open to interpretation.

The original paintings appear in full, but also re-emerge as collages—cut, recombined, and layered into new forms. A gesture toward memory’s tendency to reassemble what’s been lost.

Fragmenti marked a turning point not just artistically, but geographically. It was the first Paris To Kyiv album to receive international distribution—with a particularly meaningful release through Poland’s influential Koka Records.

Founded in 1989 by Volodymyr Nakonieczny, Koka became a vital outlet for underground Ukrainian music—both avant-garde and traditional—especially from the Polish-Ukrainian borderlands. Their catalogue was singular in scope, championing artists like Cukor Bila Smert’, Svitlana Nianio, and Mykhailo Hai. Fragmenti didn’t fit that mold exactly. But perhaps that was the point.

Though created in Canada, the album struck a chord with Koka’s aesthetic: spare, searching, rooted in cultural specificity but unafraid to experiment. When Alexis Kochan connected with Nakonieczny during her tour of Poland, the kinship was felt. For me, having long admired Koka’s role in the Ukrainian underground, seeing our work recognized by them was a rare and resonant moment.

Fragmenti also arrived during the Orange Revolution—a time of reckoning and possibility. Though recorded in Winnipeg and New York, the album spoke to a broader Ukrainian experience, shaped not by geography, but by memory, reinvention, and cultural continuity.

• Western Canadian Music Award – Best Album Design (Ron Sawchuk)

The original Fragmenti artwork unfolded to reveal a triptych of poppy pod paintings, each representing a phase of the human condition—potential, memory, and resilience. But there had been a fourth idea at the time: a graphic silhouette of a single red poppy, its stem dripping downward like blood or ink. Visually distinct from the painted series, it was set aside—unfinished. The original unfolded in white; the remix reappeared in black. A reversal of surface that carried symbolic weight—and set the stage for what followed.

A decade later, as new interest in Fragmenti emerged, that shelved concept found renewed urgency. Ukrainian unrest deepened as the Russo-Ukrainian conflict escalated. The poppy’s clean silhouette and downward drip became a potent image—both a time capsule and a response. A symbol of protest and of continuity. A bleeding poppy. A mark that won’t fade. A silent witness.

Where past Paris To Kyiv releases gave visual space to illustrated content, this one turned to graphic minimalism. The front cover featured only three elements: a red poppy silhouette, a cross-lattice pattern, and the elegantly spaced title lockup. The poppy was gloss varnished onto a matte black background—its sheen catching light like liquid. The cross-lattice, rendered in varnish only, evoked both confessional grille and windowpane. A geometric echo of the square frames used in Fragmenti.

Embossing and varnish offer two distinct tactile signals—each directing attention in its own way. On Fragmenti, an embossed square had framed the text—elevating the surface as though it had been carved. On the remix album, the same area was marked with a broad field of gloss varnish, amplifying the tonal contrast and directing attention through light and sheen.

The project brought together a diverse slate of international remixers—each invited by curator Adam Hannibal to reinterpret the source material through their own lens. Some approached it with reverence, others with radical invention. But all shared a common intent: to reanimate the fragments.

Remixers included Juno winner Rise Ashen (Canada), Greek downtempo artist Cayetano, Swedish sound designer Anders Peterson, New York hip hop producer J57, Winnipeg’s Ken Gregory and Joe Silva, and Montreal’s Miguel Graça, among others. Each track layered the sacred and the synthetic, the folkloric and the futuristic.

The result was a sonic terrain that felt expansive and trans-temporal. New meanings emerged—not by replacing the original material, but by refracting it. This wasn’t a step forward so much as a glance sideways—an alternate path revealed, if only for a moment.