On his new EP ‘Тигролови (Tiger Hunters)’, Berlin-based Ukrainian artist Daniel Merkulov, recording as Aircraft, gathers fragments and memories of his homeland into a six-track meditation that moves between human cruelty, historical trauma, friendship, nostalgia and myth.
Taking its name from the novel by Ukrainian dissident writer Ivan Bahrianyi, the EP arrives with an immediate sense of pursuit and resistance. His story has long carried associations of repression, escape and the refusal to be broken by hostile systems, making it a fitting reference point for music concerned with the forces that shape Ukrainian identity across generations.
Opening track ‘Люди’ (‘People’) begins with a troubling contradiction. Human beings create communities, music and tenderness, yet they are equally capable of destruction. And that recognition gives the EP a difficult emotional foundation. History is not only shaped by abstract institutions; it’s enacted through individual decisions, prejudices and acts of courage or violence. ‘People’ confronts that duality without attempting to make it comfortable.
While ‘Гаю Час’ (‘Wasting Time’) turns inward, considering how much of life can disappear while waiting for circumstances to improve. Worry becomes a suspended state, keeping the mind trapped inside possibilities it cannot influence. There’s something especially resonant in that idea within a Ukrainian context. Waiting for peace, safety, return or some version of normality can become a life in itself. And here, Aircraft looks for a way to remain present even when the future refuses to clarify.
That search leads naturally into ‘Навколо Ніч’ (‘Night All Around’), where companionship becomes a form of illumination. Darkness still surrounds the song, but it’s no longer faced alone. Friendship and love do not remove the threat; but they do make it possible to continue through it.
Aircraft’s established musical language seems particularly suited to such material. Merkulov’s work has long brought understated vocals, drum machines, worn synthesisers and shadowed guitar lines into close contact. His music can carry the distance of early electronic pop before slipping into the blurred emotional textures of shoegaze and dream-pop. The result often feels both intimate and slightly unreal, as though heard through memory rather than in the present.
And that atmosphere should give ‘Зона’ (‘Zone’) considerable weight. The track reflects upon Chornobyl as something embedded within Ukraine’s cultural imagination. The disaster has become a landscape, warning, metaphor and inherited fear all at once, a place both physically abandoned and continually revisited through art.
‘Дивно’ (‘Strange’) shifts the EP towards cultural remembrance, paying tribute to the Ukrainian popular music that helped shape the post-Soviet 90s. Echoes of Skryabin and Okean Elzy connect Aircraft to a period when a newly independent country was discovering fresh ways to speak, sound and imagine itself.
All while the closing ‘Мавка’ (‘Mavka’) expands the EP beyond history and into folklore. Inspired by the forest spirit of Ukrainian mythology, the track follows a love divided by the boundary between the human and supernatural worlds. As the final chapter, ‘Mavka’ draws together many of its central concerns. Love offers transformation but not always fulfilment. The past remains alive without becoming reachable. Freedom can be imagined even when circumstance denies it. Fantasy and reality merge until longing becomes its own landscape.
And that complexity ultimately becomes one of the EP’s greatest strength. Ukraine is not reduced to suffering, just as resilience is not presented as effortless heroism. Aircraft allows darkness, humour, affection and imagination to remain beside one another.
‘Тигролови’ is a compact but far-reaching work that searches through the ruins of history without losing sight of the figures still moving within them. Daniel Merkulov has created an EP that honours culture by allowing it to change shape inside his own dreamlike musical world.
The hunters may still be closing in, but Aircraft’s songs continue to find paths through the forest.