Overwhelmed. Stressed. It's everything. Both my jobs and everything else is pulling at me at the same time. The festival, Music Saves UA and its subprojects, whatever you can imagine, everything is happening at the same time. I can barely manage it. But this is always better than not having something to do. That would be the killing blow. This is hard, but good.

With Music Saves UA we worked on a toolkit for festivals to learn about raising funds and awareness for the last couple of months. It’s a guide of over 70 pages that shows festivals how to book Ukrainian artists, how to create panels about Ukraine and how to raise money with a variety of initiatives such as recycling bottles. We lead by example, as we show the audience how we do this with our own festival.

In addition, we just released a documentary about the Music Ambassador Tour of 2024. We hosted 12 music professionals for five days in Ukraine. They visited Kyiv, Borodyanka, Irpin, and Chernihiv. You can watch some of the footage here.

And then there is Atlas Festival. Once again, as in 2021, we organised it in three months. We moved the 2020 edition to 2021, because of COVID. But because many other European festivals didn’t happen in 2021, lots of artists were not touring as well. The entire line-up we had needed to be revised, so we built the festival back up in three months.

We thought it would never get crazier than that, but then the war came. Now we're in 2024 and we are creating a festival in even less time and an even crazier circumstance.

Safety is different in every city. Some cities are closer to the front line, which makes them a more frequent target and they get relentlessly bombed every day. Other cities are further. The missiles that want to reach those cities need to fly further to reach them, so it’s easier for us to intercept.

Because we know that, events and concerts have been happening again since 2022. They happen wherever it is possible. We have apps on our phone that tell us when missiles are coming in. There is an air raid alarm.

A lot of artists play in front line cities, regardless of the bombing. Music Saves UA did a little festival in Zaporizhzhia for one day at the end of April, and it was fully done in a shelter that fit 600 people. Three artists played that day, and there were events, lectures: all kinds of things. Just to bring culture to people. Because, if people in Kyiv get concerts, why should people in Herkimer or Zaporizhzhia not?

In Kyiv it's a bit easier than in Zaporizhzhia; you need to evacuate people and have shelters available.

For Atlas Festival, the only reason we were able to do it this year, is that we found a venue that we consider to be safe enough. It's not our regular venue. Since our second festival in 2016, we were doing it on the National Expo Center, which is a huge open area, but it doesn't work for the current circumstances. There are no shelters that are close and big enough to be able to do something there.

So, we have found a mall in Kyiv called Blockbuster Mall. They have a huge underground parking of more than 50km² that can easily fit more than 100,000 people inside. Of course, we're not going to have a hundred thousand people. Far from it. The maximum amount of people we will have is 25,000. And that includes staff, crew, artists and free tickets that we will give to people with disabilities. We will use certified software to calculate how quickly we can evacuate people if needed. We calculated how we can evacuate 30,000 people in a certain amount of time and decided we will have 25,000 people. That means we will evacuate them even faster than what we counted.

We felt this is as safe as it gets and it’s also how concerts happen. Concerts usually have a shelter near the venue or somewhere else. We have a shelter super close as well. From any stage at the festival, you can reach the shelter very quickly. Because it's an underground parking, it has very wide entrances (and a lot of them) as usually cars are dropped there. That makes it easier for people to get in there quickly, and there’s an entire evacuation plan for each sector of the crowd to reach each entrance with people guiding them there.

We will even have a stage at that shelter. Festivalgoers will be able to continue listening to music and dancing, knowing that they are safe regardless of what's happening above them.

We’ve made this plan together with the authorities and the government. So, we are allowed to do that and there is no other way.

The Ukrainian artists are very excited to play. There have been other festivals in Ukraine, but Atlas is the most well-known. And having Atlas come back during the war is a good sign. It’s something we used to have before the war. It's been gone for two years and here it is coming back.

With this in mind, artists are very excited. For Ukranian artists, we booked everyone who we could book, so basically everyone who was available we got on board. We will end up having something close to 100 artists. So, it's a very small festival compared to what we used to have.

With international artists it's been really difficult, as you can imagine. Not surprising at all. Most of artists’ agents have no idea that the live music scene in Ukraine is actually very much alive and booming. There have been international artists who came to play in the Lviv or in Kyiv. Some of them already came to play twice, playing regular shows. These were incredible shows because for the audience, this was amazing. We don't get that anymore. And to have someone willingly coming to Ukraine to support us and to play music, knowing that you come here and you risk your life. Yes, there is a security protocol. Yes, there is air defence. But they are coming from a peaceful country, willingly to a country where a missile can hit you at any point.

For Atlas Festival, so far we have three international artists, including Sharon den Adel from Within Temptation. She will come alone and will play the band's music with an orchestra and a choir. The program for it is being written by a young Ukrainian composer, Maria Yaremak.

With an orchestra this will be more piano driven, very cinematic, very epic; gentle but very powerful at the same time. And people are going to hear this version for the first time at the festival. We are incredibly grateful to Within Temptation because it's by far the biggest artist who came to Ukraine like that, apart from Bono, of course.

The band came to shoot a music video for it in March, with the help of Music Saves UA. And they even recorded a song with the Ukrainian artist Alex Yarmak. They decided if they do a song with a Ukrainian artist about Ukraine, they also should do a video for this song in Ukraine. An amazing Ukrainian director who's really popping off recently did the video.

Sharon did a bunch of interviews and recorded countless selfie videos of soldiers on the frontlines for whom this was an amazing surge of energy and hope for the future. When you have one of your favourite artists supporting you at such a time, that’s amazing.

They invited regular people to join them in the music video. When the band posted that they were going to shoot the music video in Ukraine, people didn't expect that they would actually come but thought they’d rather outsource it to Ukraine. So, when Sharon came to shoot that music video, we just saw so many happy tears in people's eyes. Their idol comes to support them and is not scared to risk their lives to really stand up for you. Their last album was really Ukraine driven as well. So, I think in that regard it was not surprising that they agreed.

Other international artists are the Lithuanian act Beissoul & Einius. They played the festival many times, almost every year. It's a band from Lithuania, so we are not surprised that they would go for it. They also shot a music video earlier in Ukraine. So, when we approached them, they were like: “Oh, of course! We love your festival. And to hear that it's coming back during the war, of course we want to be a part of it.”

There's also going to be a Japanese band named Heavenphetamine. So yeah, we've got the Netherlands, we've got Japan, and we've got Lithuania. But, please bear in mind, I started approaching artists two, three months before the festival. In this crazy touring world, that just doesn't work. You need to approach people one year before everything, and that's in normal conditions. And here I am approaching them, saying, “Can you please come perform under the missiles and within two months? Also, we will not pay you anywhere close to what you got elsewhere in Europe!” You don't really expect a lot of answers that say: “Yes, we’d love that!”

We probably have the best production teams in Europe, and they still have all their equipment. They can do impossible things for stupidly low amounts of money. While people are sitting at conferences complaining about the post-COVID production costs, there is an entire country worth of production teams that are out of job because of the war.

Even if you’d pay for their travels to come to your country from Ukraine, it will still be cheaper than getting your regular technicians and crews.