KA’APER

Evgeny:
“We sing about the same things as everyone else – love, hate, life and death – but through stories written thousands of years ago.”

Timur:
“When we listen and feel that the story is told – then it is told.”

Timur:
“We are tiny particles of sand in the huge desert of time.”

Evgeny:
“Sometimes I don’t believe in a song – then Max does his magic and suddenly it works.”

Timur:
“Strong emotions must be served in the right moment, when the listener is ready.”

Timur:
“Mixing and production was as much a creative process as writing the songs.”

Timur:
“Our songs broadcast the whole frequency range – it’s up to the listener to tune in.”

Timur:
“We don’t write fast or slow on purpose – we write when the emotion is ready.”

Evgeny:
“Ancient myths are darker than most modern stories – and far more honest.”

Evgeny:
“Music is a kind of theatre – once we step off the stage, we’re just ordinary people again.”

Timur:
“Every song is a story, but not every story needs an explanation.”

Timur:
“Nostalgia is dangerous when you try to live inside it.”

Evgeny:
“It’s impossible to just erase your previous life from memory. From time to time the yearning for home bursts out and hits pretty hard.”

Ka’aper are a band shaped by distance – geographical, cultural, and emotional.
Formed by Russian and Ukrainian musicians now based in Cyprus, their music feels less tied to scenes or trends and more to memory, ritual, and time itself.
Drawing from ancient myths, desert imagery, and slow-unfolding compositions, Ka’aper build songs that feel like places rather than statements.
In this in-depth conversation, Fok ’bs‘ speaks with Evgeny and Timur about exile and freedom, impermanence and monumentality, patience as expression, and why their music deliberately resists immediacy in favor of immersion.
Ka’aper exist between places, languages, and cultural memories.
How does living and creating music away from your original homes shape the emotional temperature of your sound?
Evgeny:
“Hey guys! Timur and Evgeny are here! Thanks for having us. Well, we’re getting started with really deep and emotional questions, I like it. To be honest, I love Cyprus from the bottom of my heart and I can say that I’m happy here, having a good interesting life, but anyway, it’s impossible to just erase your previous life from your memory, and from time to time the yearning for the home where you grew up bursts out and sometimes hits pretty hard. For example, one of the songs from ‘While Flows The Nile’ which is called ‘Never Come Home’ tells the story of a soldier who is far away from home and he knows he will never come back. It actually comes from my own emotions.”
Your music often feels rooted in ancient symbols rather than modern narratives.
Is this a conscious way of stepping outside contemporary identities and into something more timeless?
Evgeny:
“This is a way to make the music darker. Some ancient myths are desperately macabre and it’s a huge unexplored area and space for imagination. While the majority of bands sing about stuff like love and hate, life and death, fidelity and betrayal, we actually sing about the same, but cover them with stories written thousands of years ago. Thousands. Of years. Ago. This thought gives me goosebumps and a pretty weird feeling of serenity. When you realise that life is just a small grain of sand and there were billions of lives like yours, all of them came to an end, and there is nothing left – you try to live your life right now, in this exact moment. This is a very important skill. During one of my trips, I met a really wise man in Oman and he said, ‘There is no tomorrow, every tomorrow is just another today’. So fucking precise!”
Being a Russian-Ukrainian band based in Cyprus places you in a unique in-between space.
Do you experience this distance as loss, freedom, or a necessary silence?
Evgeny:
“It depends on the exact moment. Sometimes it feels like a loss, but to be honest, mostly it feels amazing. As I said, this island is an excellent place. I’ve been living here for almost 7 years and now I’m sure if I were forced to go back, I would struggle to find my place in my hometown, so I don’t want to return.”
Timur:
“Definitely a loss of reaching many people we used to have next to us, loss of the achievements and statuses we earned in our adult life. Definitely a freedom to reconsider many points because we are still cultural strangers in Cyprus – public opinion does not involve the tourists, so we can shape our combined ‘before’ and ‘after’ perception, and society wouldn’t bother much. As for necessary silence, nope, I don’t think any of us took it as a decision to go an easy way.”
The imagery of stone, desert, and erosion suggests permanence slowly being undone.
Does this reflect a personal relationship with impermanence, or is it purely symbolic?
Timur:
“It’s like a reflection of permanence, yes, and understanding of our life and death cycle being small particles of sand in the huge desert of time. So continuing the metaphor of the sand in a desert, our songs reflect both – how the eternal monuments shape the desert through the time, and how fast and negligible is our path in this desert.”
Ka’aper’s songs feel less like statements and more like rituals.
What needs to happen internally before a piece feels ‘ready‘ to be released into the world?
Timur:
“Good question. Sometimes we spend a week or more putting all the pieces in place. Other times I just start playing, catch the idea and make a draft in like an hour, then I send it to Evgeny, he takes an hour or two to listen and feel the melody, and that’s it. There is no rule or guideline on what we consider as a ready song, but whenever we listen and feel that the story is told, then it is told. Every song is like a story that you want to tell to your audience. Sometimes it is a bold and simple emotion in one short event, sometimes it is a whole spectrum of feelings that you live through along with the characters being depicted in your story.”
Cyprus is an island shaped by crossings, empires, and fractures.
Has the landscape or atmosphere of your current home influenced the way you approach sound and space?
Evgeny:
“For sure! All this concept is based on my own trips and stuff I saw with my own eyes. Egypt is here, only a one-hour flight away, so from time to time I go there to find some inspiration. In addition, Cyprus itself has a fantastic and outstanding history. So my answer is yes, the atmosphere here helps a lot!”
Your compositions unfold slowly, resisting immediacy.
Is patience an artistic principle for Ka’aper, or a form of quiet resistance?
Timur:
“This is our way to express. Emotions, especially strong ones, must be served to the listener in the right moment, with the right mood, when the listener is ready to experience them. That’s why we always have the overture – small introduction giving you a sense of the space where the story happens, then there is a statement, the struggle, the culmination, if the story needs one, and the epilogue if the story has anything to add. In fact if you go to our shows, you will notice that first there is a dark empty stage and a melody starting. The melody flows into the first song, and then a song flows into another. Music is our way to express the mood, space, fear, majesty, fury, sadness – all the tools you would use to put more meaning into your words.”
Evgeny:
“There is an easter egg for our most attentive listeners. Even albums are going to flow into each other. ‘When Gods Walked the Earth’ starts with the last notes of ‘While Flows the Nile’. We did it on purpose, to show it’s kind of two chapters of one story.”
There’s a tension in your music between human fragility and monumental power.
Where do you personally feel closer – inside the monument, or beneath its shadow?
Evgeny:
“This is a great question! And, to be honest, I have no idea how to answer it. I’ve never thought about it from this angle, and moreover, I don’t think our music conceals anything inside, it’s just music we love to listen to and we want to share it with people. Nothing more. A pretty mechanical process. We just write a song – if we like it, we play it, if we don’t, we throw it away. It’s that simple. For example, we wrote about 15 or even more songs for our upcoming album ‘When Gods Walked The Earth’ and selected only 10 to record.”
Timur:
“For me it’s an easy question, but Evgeny doesn’t like it when I think this way he-he. We are tiny little crusts of sand on the left sandal of the colossus – the current epoch, and each of us will fall off any random moment while it is stepping through the endless desert of time.”
Evgeny:
“Wait! What? I don’t like it? No, I totally agree. Maybe not in such exaggerated terms, but I completely agree with this point of view.”
As musicians carrying more than one cultural memory, how do you prevent nostalgia from becoming a trap rather than a source?
Timur:
“We all lean to comfort and stability, sort of ‘feel like home’ thing. But of course life has a surprise for our expectations he-he. As Heraclitus said, ‘you cannot enter the same river twice’, which literally means that a memory or nostalgia depicted in your head is a fragment in life time span, it felt that way when you were that person in that place at that time, but everything changed since then, including you. So fooling ourselves with the idea that we can lean to our past to feel comfort is as crazy as squeezing yourself into slim jeans from your teens when you are past your 50th anniversary and 40 extra kilos – your reality will not fit into your memory of a cool look.”
Working with Max Baryshnikov gave your sound both clarity and restraint.
What did you deliberately choose not to amplify or exaggerate during production?
Timur:
“We had no idea how it would sound, we only knew what we wanted to achieve in some aspects. The rest was done by Max, he’s done a tremendous job helping us to find the right sound, adding layers and lowering down what doesn’t bring much value. So mixing and production was as much of a creative process as writing the songs. This is why we call Max our fifth member.”
Evgeny:
“Sometimes, I don’t really believe in a song, but then Max does some of his avadakedavra stuff, I listen to it and ‘Oh, really? Not fucking bad at all…’”
Ka’aper feels intentionally opaque, leaving space for interpretation.
Is ambiguity a shield, an invitation, or simply the most honest form of expression for you?
Timur:
“In real life, we would rarely have a firm sense of good and bad, right and wrong, happy and sad. Every situation causes emotions, every emotion has semitones. Now imagine that our characters are like radio receivers – each of us human beings is tuned to receive the specific frequencies from the entire range. So yes, the ‘radio station’ of our songs broadcasts the range, it’s up to each listener to tune for a specific frequency.”
Formed in 2024, Ka’aper emerged fully formed in atmosphere and intent.
Was this project born suddenly, or did it exist silently long before it had a name?
Evgeny:
“I met Timur in December 2023, we had a small talk about music, then we played a couple of covers at a local jam in January, then in April I was sitting at work and listening to Dark Tranquillity, I think it was ‘Haven’. I immediately recalled the conversation with Timur and texted him like, ‘Hey man, would you like to play some music?’. The next day we were sitting at my place with guitars, writing riffs for our first song (it was ‘The Sun’). In a week we had three demos ready to play. So it was sudden and rapid! And. actually, we try not to slow down.”
If Ka’aper were remembered not as a band, but as a place or state of being, what would you hope listeners carry with them after the sound fades?
Timur:
“As the outro melody in our live shows ‘says’, it has to be far in the mountains, being alone with your own thoughts. And suddenly you start getting a feel of uncontrolled fear – you realize that the only way out of this place is a hard path of survival. But in reality, while the outro plays, we smile, shake hands, say ‘thank you’ and take photos, so the dramatic effect is gone he-he.”
Evgeny:
“This is because music is a kind of theatre. Once we step off the stage, we’re again just average men in their thirties, so I don’t mind spending time after the show with the listeners. Timur doesn’t mind as well, to be honest, he-he…”
Ka’aper don’t offer answers, slogans, or comfort.
Their music exists as a landscape:
ancient, slow-moving, and indifferent to urgency.
It asks the listener not to understand, but to enter – to walk through sound shaped by memory, erosion, and time.
As Evgeny and Timur make clear, Ka’aper is not about belonging to a place or a past, but about confronting impermanence honestly – and finding meaning in the act of listening itself.
by Fok ‘bs’