A Place in Memories investigates an individual’s deep connection to a physical location and how time, experience and the immense elements outside a person’s control can influence that relationship.
The 46-minute album, set for release Aug. 7, is composed of eight ethereal ambient meditations that carry the listener to the emotional state shared by Ukrainian artist Bohdan Stupak as the artist reflects on a summer spent on the coast of the Black Sea.
Nearly a decade after making that memory in 2017, the land and waters Stupak visited have since become an active war zone where heavy naval combat dominates the landscape in the form of missile exchanges and drone strikes as sea mines are left scattered in the troubled waters.
This drastic transformation from a peaceful getaway to a place of violence galvanized the emotional core of A Place in Memories and its conceptual thesis examining place, time and meaning.
“I caught myself thinking that I consider this (now occupied) part of Ukraine not as a geographic region but rather as a certain point in the past. A time when I was full of hope, love, and the future seemed like a straight, easy stride,” Stupak shared.
“I think many of us have a certain place where they felt that way. A place in memories. So, I decided to expand this concept,” Stupak added.
To communicate this balance of joy and sadness tied to a single place and a memory of it, Stupak built the sound of the album using a combination of electronic and traditional instruments, crafting a texture of sounds that conveys both a joyful familiarity and deep sorrow.
A central basis for this sound included the use of a programming language. This decision enabled the artist to control a high-performance audio synthesis platform, shifting the workflow from a rigid timeline to a flexible, mathematical playground.
“I mixed long organic guitar drones with algorithmic SuperCollider textures to get a minimal yet somewhat mysterious, otherworldly sound,” Stupak explained.
To convey the drastic change between the peaceful coastline of the artist’s memory and the war-stricken reality of its present, Stupak drafted two dominant melodic and textural languages to shift atop a central tonal drone that acts as the project’s musical core and reflects the seemingly permanent nature of the physical place itself.
“Musically, the album has two voices: one of them is a low, massive, mostly major drone, the other one is a collection of various high-pitched drones of different feelings and textures. Some of them are slightly dissonant, others are passionate, some are minor. This is how memory plays tricks on us: making some things better upon reflection than they actually were back then or presenting some good things as bittersweet because they have passed.”
“Through the course of the album, music gets darker and more tense, yet at some point things break and new abstract textures arrive: computer-generated bells, crackles, plucks,” Stupak added. “This is how bravely facing the dark corners of our past enriches our personalities with new facets. This is how the album ends: with soothing closure, a combination of various textures and methods.”
A Place in Memories is being released through Projekt Records, a label with a 40-year legacy of specializing in intensely introspective ambient and electronic music.
The project marks Stupak’s second release through Projekt, following his 2025 homage to the European classical tradition, Book of Sorrow.
This new project continues to offer a poignant perspective on the ongoing conflict and prevails in providing a meditative space to reflect on the places we find peace and what it means to lose them.
