Green Man Review’s Daryana Antipova conducted this interview by email with Russian musician and singer Zhenya Wind.
Zhenya Wind is a multi-genre singer from St. Petersburg. Her 2025 release The Earth Moves is her fourth album. She has been the vocalist in the bands Myshi (“Mice”), Plavnost Minut (“Smoothness of Minutes”), and Zoloto (“Gold”); and has contributed to albums by Kamikadze, Edipov Kompleks (“Oedipus Complex”), Netslov (“No words”), Ole Lukoje, and others.
Zhenya Wind is engaged in the search, transcription, and popularization of traditional music from various nationalities. She has published two collections of folk songs based on materials from the Folklore and Ethnography Expedition of the St. Petersburg State University of Culture and Arts in the 1990s.
Folklore, ethnographic expeditions, and original fairy-tale songs — all of these find expression in Zhenya Wind’s work. Her music becomes a key to understanding the magic of folk traditions and stories. Joining the listeners who have chosen her songs for their playlists means immersing yourself in a true musical expedition experience — one that opens new horizons and invites you to rethink your own perception of the world.
Daryana Antipova: In the album The Earth Moves, you appear as Vasilisa the Wise. What does this image mean to you — is it more of a stage persona or a reflection of the deeper essence of your art?
Zhenya Wind: Vasilisa the Wise is a richly resonant image that goes far beyond the frame of the Russian folk fairy tale. In ancient Greek
Zhenya Wind’s album The Earth Moves
mythology, the wise Vasilisa finds a parallel in Aphrodite. Olya Loza, as an experienced and sensitive music journalist, heard these energies woven into the fabric of the music. The symbolism of transformation, power, and the discovery of hidden knowledge in a female image resonates deeply within me. The magic and mysticism of folklore, together with the simple, clear logic of fairy-tale plots flowing into song lyrics, seem to demand translation into a modern language.
Fairy tales, songs, legends, and life stories collected in fieldwork materials are often perceived as something “from the other side” — in the sense of having vanished irretrievably into the past. But the subtle realm of the human soul remains just as unexplored and full of wonder. People search for themselves over and over again. The tales told by our ancestors help us to understand who we are today. You just have to listen a little.
Daryana: Each song on the album feels like a separate fairy-tale room. Is there one you feel is especially personal, your “own”? Or did you spread your soul evenly across all eleven spaces?
Zhenya: The songs came into being unevenly — some arrangement ideas we discovered during rehearsals, others I composed at night in my home studio. Several of my lyrics were found, long forgotten, in my old field notebooks. When I transcribe field recordings, I’m always transported into a special space. The lyrics come when I resurface from those dreams of the past.
My favorite on the album is “They Are Boarded Up.” It’s about the fact that we are part of nature, and the archaic cultures of our planet remind us of this simple truth. We are in the cosmos, and the cosmos is in us. Plants, the depths of the sea, the circulatory system, the structure of galaxies, the best feats of engineering, and the paths of clouds — all paint for us an incredible ornament that we can observe across cultures, in embroidery, woodcarving, tangible and intangible heritage.
At first, I wanted to name the album after this song. But “They Are Boarded Up” sounded too pessimistic, and by nature I’m someone who “sees the bright future of humanity and moves toward it” — despite the turbulence of our present.
Daryana: Your musical language is remarkably layered: folklore, Baroque, electronics, Balkan motifs… How do you strike that delicate balance between authenticity and experimentation?
Zhenya: Everything comes from folklore — you just have to notice it. “Authenticity” is about genuineness, sincerity. Folk music began to be called “authentic” precisely because of the heartfelt honesty of its performers, with a kind of childlike spontaneity and depth.
Everyone in the world, regardless of language, knows the joy of watching children and animals. Children don’t know how they appear from the outside; they don’t switch on an observer mode. They exist outside the paradigm of adult behavioral habits. This makes their behavior absolutely natural and without judgment.
Every artist and musician strives to find that same state of total freedom from stereotypes — a centering with oneself and with society. Genres and styles are just lines we draw around our inner position.
Michael Nyman, Lisa Gerrard, Peter Gabriel, Philip Glass, Meredith Monk, John Williams, Russian folklore, the beautiful music of Lully, Brian Eno — why not?
Daryana: You’ve taken part in various projects — from more academic to vividly theatrical. Which one is your favorite or most meaningful, and why? How many have there been?
Zhenya: There have been quite a few projects. Some were even highly significant and prestigious in the global cultural space. But two remain closest to my heart: the subscription program The Circle of Life, which we presented for two years at the Children’s Philharmonic in St. Petersburg. The program was conceived by Elena Evgenievna Vasilyeva, directed by Strelnikov, with Marina Anatolyevna Kuznetsova as choir director.
Throughout the school year, we performed 8–9 musical productions based on authentic Russian folklore. The core material came from seasonal and family ritual traditions — autumn gatherings and harvest festivals, winter Christmas and Maslenitsa, weddings, spring celebrations, Lent and Easter, early summer Trinity and “rusal” songs, harvest time.
There were almost no stage sets — each program transformed the hall in a new way: the audience might be seated inside the performance, on one side of the hall, or in small “islands.” It was performance art at its best: without decorations or almost any props, only through sound, spatial arrangement, dances, round dances, and interactive audience participation we created vivid scenes. We used exclusively authentic material, yet it sounded like ambient music, avant-garde polyphony, rollicking skomorokh tunes, or medieval mystery plays.
The project was seen mainly by children and parents of our city, and although it deserved a wider audience, today I see its ideas echoed in pop culture and among folklorists. In a way, The Circle of Life grows through every project I take part in.
Daryana: How has your creative approach changed over the years? In your view, how does The Earth Moves differ from earlier works — in spirit, concept, or tone?
Zhenya: Technically, in previous works I was the songwriter and singer but didn’t create the arrangements myself or produce the music.
This is the first time.
I wanted more live performance, less electronics. Some arrangements were born in rehearsals — we tested them at concerts to see if we’d hit the emotional tone.
Another important point: we recorded in stems. First, live takes of drums, bass, guitar, percussion, and vocals; then, in a separate session, the string quartet. Later I added backing vocals, but I aimed for a sense of “real time” — recording the vocals as a single track, even keeping small imperfections. I wanted to deliver living music to the listener.
Mixing was not easy — my respect and gratitude to our sound engineer. Some tracks we remixed more than ten times. It was hard to find the balance between the relevance of electronics, the warmth of the strings, and the authenticity of the vocal lines. But when someone asked us, “Which fairy tale are these tracks for?” it became easier. We realized: this sounds like film music, not the indie rock we lived in before.
Daryana: In your work, folklore isn’t a museum artifact but a living, breathing space. How do you see yourself: folk singer, composer, researcher?
Zhenya: As a researcher of the personality structure of a folk singer. Composer — only just beginning to spread her wings.
Daryana: Your arrangements are complex, full of hidden references and cultural “Easter eggs.” Do you worry that part of the audience might remain “on this side of the door”? Or is it important that the listener makes their own effort, like a fairy-tale hero?
Zhenya: I’m sure every artist has their own audience. We all read books, watch films — there are many far more complex works of art and science out there than what Zhenya Wind creates.
If anything, my task is to popularize authenticity. There’s a large group of people who appreciate complex music and challenging films, yet Russian folklore has simply passed them by. Historically, there are reasons for this — no need to dig into them now, I think many can guess. But right now Russian folklorists have a window of opportunity to show this intelligent audience what this music really is.
Daryana: In your opinion, why do people come to folk music? What brought you to this world, and what keeps you in it?
Zhenya: People search for origins. The secret room, unsolved mysteries of the past, inexplicable coincidences, the mix of mysticism and simplicity — these are what draw people to ethnography. Coincidence, as we know, is God’s language, and it was coincidence that brought me to ethnomusicology.
One of the favorite games of Izaly Zemtsovsky — a world-renowned ethnomusicologist (teaching at Berklee) — during lectures on world folklore was to play us several song excerpts and have us guess their origins. How surprised we were when we confused Africa with the Bryansk region, under his amused gaze.
Once you are touched by authenticity, you never let it go — ask anyone who has been. Those who haven’t been touched simply haven’t heard it yet. And it doesn’t matter where in the world the music comes from — you start to hear and recognize authenticity in the ocean of global sounds.
Daryana: You work with symphony orchestras and large ensembles for Christmas shows. How do you manage to unite so many people and inspire them to work with you?
Zhenya Wind: This is the hardest question. I won’t downplay my work — it’s truly not easy, because people are people. But perhaps those who join me see my genuine relationship with the material and the process.
Maybe we’re all united by the nature of beauty — we speak to listeners from the stage about important things, understandable even without knowing the language. We sing in dialects, and Russian-speaking audiences listen as if to a foreign tongue — the words are unclear, but the context is understood. Musical metaphors, visuals, costumes, and elements of the show reinforce the imagery, creating a sense of connection to something vast.
Daryana: What do you think distinguishes you from other Russian folk or cross-genre artists? What might listeners from other countries find in your work?
Zhenya: We invite you to pause, breathe, and reflect.
“People are irrational by nature — which is why the emotional factor in consumer demand is key. People need people. The mimicry of the non-living as living will cause ever-increasing revulsion, just as spam calls from talking robots are already unbearable. The ‘uncanny valley’ effect is physiologically insurmountable.
The demand for people and their services will only grow, no matter how AI develops. Algorithms have no taste, but the audience does.”
That’s a comment I once read on a post debating whether AI will replace writers. It struck me so precisely that I saved it in my notes. Listeners have taste. People need people. The mimicry of the non-living as a human voice already causes rejection. This is why music worldwide is turning toward live performance, toward folk, and inward.
