Sudnozavod (Ukr. “Shipyard”) is an album from 2025 by ILYICH, a musician and artist from Kherson, Ukraine, also known as Anton Kats. Their work spans sound, performance, film, and radio, shaped by questions of listening, displacement, and sonic antifascism. An artistic fabulation grounded in lived experience, the album draws from the sounds of 1970s and 1990s Ukraine, embracing jazz fusion, spoken word, pop, field recordings, electronic music, and cinematic soundscapes.

The shipyard in question is situated in the delta of the Dnipro in southern Ukraine. It was once the largest shipbuilding site in the USSR, giving birth to Vishwa Asha, meaning Universal Hope, a cargo ship built in 1974 during the Indo-Soviet partnership. Decades later, Vishwa Asha is decommissioned or lost, a ghost ship drifting through the fractured narratives of war.

The album responds to global fascization, specifically through the lens of Russia’s invasion and occupation of Ukraine, a fascist regime claiming to lead an “anti-fascist operation.” While grounded in the specific context of Ukraine, the album listens outwardly, searching for resonance and standing in solidarity with other struggles against militarism, authoritarianism, and colonial violence across the globe.

Recorded in the midst of multiple wars and genocides, from Palestine to Sudan, to Congo and beyond, the album listens into crisis without ethical certainty. It embraces transmigration, a nonlinear temporality where reincarnation becomes a way to move through birth and death with agency. It weaves musical harmony, cosmology, and feminism to reject heroic constructs in favor of listening, care, and renewal.

He produced this album with the help of several guest musicians: Andrii Barmalii (saxophone), George Lewis Jr., aka Twin Shadow, Valery Volkov (drums), Yuri Shepeta (piano), and rising Hungarian flutist Fanni Zahár (flute), Susanne Sachsse (voice), Olivia Lucy Phillip (voice)