Sonya Belaya’s Dacha holds generations in its hands. The six-song cycle channels lineages through sound, carrying the weight of generational trauma in visceral, embodied form. Written during the first winter of war, the album weaves Soviet feminist poetry, bard traditions, and Eastern European folk songs into compositions that refuse easy categorization. There is a spectral quality to this music, something that moves through listeners rather than past them. Belaya embraces that gravity with such care that Dacha becomes a warm, inviting soundworld. She doesn’t just tell these stories in songs; she actualizes them. The album navigates her grandfather’s death from COVID-19, her grandmother’s wartime passing, her mother’s disappearance, a PTSD diagnosis, all of it, and it doesn’t collapse under that weight. Instead, Belaya creates ritual space where displacement and cultural memory become pathways to something like resilience. Dacha is an utterly remarkable record.
Dacha is OUT NOW on Ropeadope. Sonya’s website can be found HERE.
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What’s your first memory of music? Not necessarily a formal musical moment, but the first time sound felt meaningful or important to you.
My first memory of sound being meaningful and important … two memories come to mind. Communal singing in the Russian Orthodox Church, particularly the midnight Easter service. It’s a grandiose event, marking death with a cappella chants and somber choir songs. Singing Soviet bard songs with my dad. Both of these memories of sound felt like portals and passageways for me as a child of Russian immigrants.
I’m curious about the sonic landscape of your childhood. What were the sounds inside your home, and what did they carry with them?
I grew up in a neighborhood of middle-class houses built in the mid-late 90s in Florida. My house had no carpet – everything in the house was very resonant, hollow. Cold tile bouncing off the sounds of an upright Yamaha piano that my parents scraped together the money for to buy for me. The sounds of my house are The Tennis Channel, the sound of cooking, where my mother cooked Soviet diaspora food for her three kids. The sounds of only three English-speaking artists – Sting, The Beatles, and Pink Floyd – surrounded by CDs and tapes of various Russian artists. The sounds of my childhood also had violence reverberating from the popcorn ceilings – screams, slamming doors. I hear the sound of a garage door. That was the sound of violence arriving. The sound of violence was cleansed by the sound of water. Twenty minutes from the lapping waves of the Atlantic, or the neighborhood pool, the sound of water was а way the land would repent. These were the sounds of our diasporic living – middle-class immigrants trying to make sense of the new world around them.
The sound of home is also the sound of my family’s apartments in Russia. I grew up spending every summer there. The sound of MTV Russia, my babushka’s and dedushka’s laughter, songs, and plays I would make with my cousins, many dishes clanking from big family dinners. It’s the sound of my dacha – the old summer shack that was my solace as a child – bike bells on muddy roads, roosters exhaling their morning call for prayer. These sounds carry peace for me.
When did you first sit at a piano? What drew you there, or who brought you to it?
I started playing piano when I was five years old. I think my parents knew I had some love of song, and the Soviet music education system typically puts children in music lessons at a young age. I think I loved the feeling of being good at something, and that my parents were proud of me in some way.
You work with Soviet bard traditions and Eastern European folk songs. When did you first encounter these forms, and what was your relationship to them before they became material for your own compositions?
The Soviet bard tradition is one that was a big part of my life growing up. It’s a social music tradition, at dinner tables and celebrations, where one or two people play guitar, and everyone sings these songs. In Florida, it was Soviet diaspora friends of my parents that they managed to meet in this strange alien swamp land. In Russia, it was us connecting back to our family – my uncle singing and playing guitar meant I was home. These songs are protest songs – some more subversive than others. Recordings were made in secret, and you could get arrested if found with a recording of this music. I didn’t really return to these songs until I started to reflect on what my cultural heritage was after my mother’s disappearance. I was seeking how to create a memory palace of my cultural heritage.
Your grandfather appears throughout this album, both in life and after his passing. What role did he play in your musical life, if any? Were there songs or sounds you shared?
My grandfather lived in Moscow and was mostly just supportive from afar of me. He was obsessed with the capacity of technology, so he always watched any videos or livestreams available of my concerts. He also had a deep love for bard songs, and I think as a Russian Jew who lost his father in WWII, they were a part of his legacy of resistance. He had a couple of CDs that I remember fondly – one in particular of the Barry Sisters singing “Tum Balalaika”.
You describe your work as using “rituals of domesticity.” That phrase caught me. What does ritual mean in your creative practice, and how does the domestic space function for you?
I think a lot about immigrant women who are reduced to their domestic capacity. Language and cultural barriers prevent many immigrant women from being seen as anything but their domestic capacity. This was the case for my mother, who struggled to not be her fullest self – as a geologist with a PhD, she suddenly arrived to the United States and felt reduced to her domestic role as a mother. She was only able to reconnect somewhat with other parts of herself later in life, in her 40s, but even then, she only taught one or two courses. I think about her disconnect, and wonder if domestic work can be treated as spiritual – its creative capital as equal to any other practice. I love ritual domestic forms because they require a tactile patience – and are a great connective thread between all of us. These rituals are crucial work, and I am always curious to elevate them in my work – like an altar, an offering. I also love the films of Chantal Akerman, who spent a lot of time documenting women in their domestic spaces. These seemingly mundane moments – dishes, cooking, laundry – are so precious in her films.
You’re working with Anna Akhmatova’s poetry on this album. When did you first encounter her work, and what made her words feel essential to carry forward into sound?
I came across her poetry when Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022. I was looking for ways to reconcile the atrocities that were happening, the reality that I may not see my family for the foreseeable future, and how to process everything that was happening. The history of artists during that time is incredibly powerful, and I felt that including her poetry was important in contextualizing the history of cultural resistance throughout Russia’s history – and to offer a window for folks that may not know about that history.
This album was written during the winter months following the onset of war. I won’t ask you to explain trauma, but I am curious: did the act of writing this music feel like survival, documentation, protest, or mourning? Something else entirely?
It was absolutely a survival mechanism. Looking back, it was a lot of intellectualization of deeply intense, painful moments. I did want to document what resistance can look like, make sense of the chaos, and try to understand what my role as an artist can be in this moment. It was also a way to care for myself – to bring into my own understanding that a culture is not a monolith – there are many, many Russians who didn’t and don’t support this horrible war.
“Three Sisters” is dedicated to your siblings after your mother’s disappearance. That’s an enormous weight to carry into a composition. What did you need that piece to hold or do for the three of you?
This song is a playful adventure song – my husband likes to say it is the Belaya Sisters’ theme song. I like to think of it as in dialogue with our little selves – little Masha, Sasha, Sonya – as little superheroes in a Soviet era cartoon – sticking together to make sense of a chaotic world. I wanted this song to be a celebration of our incredible resilience. The opening text is from a Pushkin epic that starts as “three young maidens by the window” – this poem is one that many kids would have memorized in Russia. I would say it’s the most joyous song on the album – to lean into joy is something we are learning how to do as a family, having survived an incredible amount of loss.
The album is described as functioning as both personal elegy and communal ritual. Who is the community you’re imagining when you think about this work being heard?
I wrote this album three years ago, but really the communal ritual of bearing witness is something I think about a lot – what does it mean to bear witness to someone’s story as a community? How do we listen, archive, connect threads of our histories? The communal ritual of bearing the presence of interconnected atrocities – how can sound archive communal pain and suffering? I think about the community of people living in diaspora, who are making sense of their lived cultural heritage amidst horrendous acts of violence by their own government – this album is a communal ritual for the people who love their land deeply by fighting to dismantle the very structures that destroyed love in their land.
You use the term “outer-nationalism” to describe your creative vision. What does that word mean to you, and what futures are you trying to imagine through it?
I love that this term is coming up a lot, and I’d love to give credit to Amirtha [Kidambi] for resurrecting this term in her practice. It’s a term from Ryuichi Sakamoto, imagining universes beyond government-created boundaries and as culturally interconnected struggles. Your laundry is also my laundry, your dishes are my dishes – how do we do laundry together? I am grateful for friends and colleagues who live with the wisdom of outer nationalism – diasporic living has an emotional intelligence to it that can be tapped to save humanity. It’s a second brain, third arm, third eye, you get the metaphor. I am really interested in that lens as a gateway for continued collective resistance, but also as a preferred framework of diplomacy. I am interested in a future that resists creating monoliths out of people based on the actions of their government – one that values individual resistance beyond Western frameworks of understanding of what resistance can look like. Outer-nationalism allows portals for all kinds of interconnected resistance while giving space for the specificity of each culture’s framework. Especially when it comes to the safety of oppressed peoples globally, trusting the stories and legacies of those people, letting them be experts in their own experience. Patient-centered care, if you will.
And lastly to close, as always… What are some of your favorite sounds in the world?
I love the sound of the Russian metro announcements, the sound of the wheat fields at my dacha, ocean waves, and Florida cicadas. I love the sound of my mother’s voice, my grandfather’s, the sounds of my sisters and husband laughing. I love the sound of poetry read to me. I love the sound of birds in Umbria. The silence in Sunset Park on a rainy day. Coquí singing in Puerto Rico, and the silence of Ghost Ranch in New Mexico.
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