“GarageBand on iPhone, Moog’s Model D app and anger so deep you feel it in your bones make for surprisingly fertile soil,” remarks Ukrainian musician Timur Dzhafarov.

Prior to the current war with Russia, Dzhafarov was making what he calls “experimental electronic music” under the name John Object, “playing shows in Ukraine and, occasionally, in Europe”. All that changed in February when he signed up to join the army. “I volunteered two days after the invasion, because staying at home had become completely unbearable,” he tells me via the Telegram app on his phone. For the last year, he’s exchanged the life of a musician for active service.

“I am currently a safe distance from the front lines, working with higher command on artillery calculations, orders, documents and training for deployment,” he explains. “Our base, however, is reachable by medium to long range weapons, drones, and we have lost an ammo depot during one of the attacks, watching the sky light up for several hours one night. I intend to be a musician for years and years to come, but I make a point of considering myself a soldier right now. It is my job and I am good at it, and it matters to me.”

John Object’s Bandcamp page reveals the kind of work he’s left behind. His 2018 EP Heat presents four tracks of information-rich, heavily syncopated computer funk. The full-length album Sweat collates live tracks recorded between 2017–18: glitchy, fidgety and hyper-detailed club bangers with slivers of jungle, break beat and IDM nestled within. Just before enlisting, Dzhafarov uploaded a compendious 58 track album entitled Life – “an anthology of my early/unreleased work, beginning with high school juvenilia”. It’s a markedly more contemplative collection featuring limpid keyboard studies, ambient electronic sketches, minimalist sampledelia and queasy robo-exotica alongside more typical exercises in rhythmic complexity.

Explaining his decision to share these earlier works, Dzhafarov observes with a fatalistic tone: “It seemed fairly reasonable to consider what will remain of me.” Text on his Bandcamp page fleshes out the story: “Currently we are all being bombed. I have no idea what my life is going to be like tomorrow and how much longer I have, so I felt it appropriate to share an archive of my 2010–2019 works, in case I never get to do that when I’m old.”

Despite the immediate, deadening reality of his life as a soldier, music remains an ongoing concern. “The majority of work is mechanical, numbing, so while I technically have little free time, the mind does wander. I think about music and sex pretty much nonstop.” In his downtime in the evenings, as he beds down on a yoga mat in a hangar, he uses apps on his phone to compose – “programming beats, writing basslines on the Model D, guitar riffs, lyrics in Ukrainian”.

Unsurprisingly, his experiences of the last year have changed his approach to making music. “Experimental, detached, fantasy work now feels like a whimsical luxury, born out of free time and a relatively peaceful, focused mind,” he admits. Moreover, he’s already started working in new directions: “Two records are revealing themselves: an angular, weird punk rock album, and a dark EBM thing, both specifically for a Ukrainian audience. The pieces are there: about 50 sketches for each, and I am so angry I could scream right now. I’ll start work as soon as I’m back, I promise.”

To facilitate this anticipated new work, he’s been channelling his army pay into buying new equipment, ordered online and delivered to his mother’s apartment back home. “I am in the process of remotely assembling a fairly unique Doepfer A-100 modular synthesizer, which is, for now, meant to be a polyphonic expander for a Moog Matriarch I bought in the summer. I’ve been spending every last penny on gear, just to have something to look forward to: besides the above, I got a Stratocaster, a bass, a Vox AC15, a Korg MS-20, lots of pedals, and, of course, leather and fetish gear to play dress up. Spending a year in uniform makes me want to never look normal again.”