Help replace damaged UDAGAN performance equipment
Donation protected
UDAGANuniverse is creating art, music and literature content based on ancient and unknown knowledge of indigenous people of Siberia, specifically the Republic of Sakha. We both come from a background of professional performance and live concerts are a huge part of what we do.
The art we are making is for everyone and we are making sure to present it online digitally as well as at concerts. We have recently launched our new website at UDAGANuniverse.com — a hub for all our work.
We are fundraising in order to replace live performance equipment that was damaged at a recent concert. The loss of this equipment prevents us performing future live performances, which make up a large part of our ability to support ourselves financially.
To replace our critical equipment and be able to resume live performances, we need to reach around £650. We have set our goal to £1000 — beyond this, donations will go towards production and publishing costs for the upcoming work set out in the detailed plan at the bottom of this text. Anything surplus will be put towards developing our business at a faster pace and bringing our cultural offering to a wider audience. We are really pushing with everything we can give these days and any available resources allow us to create better content, achieve our planned goals quicker and to organise more elaborate performances on a wider national radius.
Who are we?
Individually, we are Saydyy Kuo Fedorova and Oscar South from the Sakha Republic and from the UK, we are making music and writing, teaching and sharing our knowledge. We are now based in Sheffield, UK. Our UDAGANuniverse project is our passion and vision in life — we believe that it is extremely important to undertake this work, as Sakha is a very unique and hidden culture in the world that we have both individually and together dedicated years of research towards building our personal knowledge. It is important to share the true and unique beauty of places like this in an honest and ethically representative way that can be treasured by the wider world for generations. Saydyy Kuo is one of the few, maybe the only native Sakha artist/performer based in the west who is able to travel freely in europe while also being qualified and experienced enough to accurately present this cultural knowledge.
Why are we fundraising?
At a recent concert, Oscar had left his live performance equipment set up on the stage as normal after our soundcheck. Saydyy Kuo was still standing on the stage while other artists from the event were preparing their equipment. Suddenly, a large wooden board that had been standing at the back of the stage fell directly onto the table where our performance equipment was set up and ready for the concert. We did not see how the board fell but heard a loud bang. As Saydyy Kuo was standing on the stage she was hit by the falling board -- very thankfully (and most importantly) the impact with the equipment table had absorbed enough momentum that she wasn't hurt. Also thankfully, nobody else was hit.
Our performance equipment was not so fortunate and sustained heavy physical damage. Sadly on inspection the next day, we found that the laptop used as the main ‘brain’ in our live performance was no longer functioning, and in addition to the physical damage (which Oscar was able to partly glue back in place) several of the hardware ports necessary for our performances were non-operational.
It is a painful setback to us, as our life been thrown about in the political winds in recent times — due to modern British residency laws we've had to relocate country two times in the past 3 years, in order to secure our long term residency here. This has destroyed the self-employed businesses as performers which had supported us before having to leave the UK, and on returning has left us very financially vulnerable -- we're still in the early stages of rebuilding our life in the UK and we’ve been very careful to maintain the important tools which allow us to provide for ourselves and grow. We have no savings or ability at this moment to replace the damaged equipment.
While living in Ireland, in order to earn enough money to live in Dublin’s rental crisis, Oscar was playing Upright Bass seven days a week at times — through pushing himself too hard physically he has sustained a chronic injury to his right forearm that has limited his ability to practice his profession. On returning to the UK, he is now undergoing physiotherapy in order to be able to work professionally full time again in the future. We are able to continue our performance work due to his adoption of music technology and ‘Live Coding’ (the art of live performance with programming languages). The recent damage to our equipment prevents us from taking on these performances until a time that we can raise the funding to replace it.
During our early days back in the UK, we have been working as hard as we can to perform, write, create as well as applying to every possible funding opportunity through arts council and other private sources. We are waiting on the results of multiple applications, but our worry is that we will not be able to fulfil the objectives of these projects without our performance equipment (these kinds of grants usually do not allow budgeting for the purchasing of new personal equipment).
In addition to replacing the equipment required to resume our live performance work, this is the 6-8 month plan for our upcoming work, which this campaign will help to fund:
Immediately, we wish to give something back to our funders as soon as possible. Saydyy Kuo would like to post a personally hand made, embroidered patch out to those who support us. As these patches are hand made, they are time consuming to embroider, so it is only possible to offer this reward for donations of £30 or more. The patch for supporters is a unique design variation that will not be available by any other means. We also have a large archive of footage from concerts, rehearsals and jam sessions over the last 5 years. So far it’s been sitting on an external hard drive, but we would like to make it available for our supporters. Oscar will be going through this material and preparing it in a format that is conveniently viewable, and we will make it accessible for our funders. There are numerous concert and many hours of footage in here!
In the close future (by late summer), we plan to together post regular videos of performance of our art onto YouTube and other platforms. The material for these performances is partly built from ancient cultural music that has been retrieved from archives then carefully developed, to reveal it’s full beauty. It will also be partly contemporary music, which we create from all our collective inspiration. Here is an early example.
During this time, we will also digitally re-release Saydyy Kuo’s ‘Aptaakh Khomus’ album, first published in 2014.
By spring 2020, we plan to release a brand new album (presently written, but not yet recorded) album by UDAGAN. It will be engineered and produced by Oscar. This album is the first iteration of our true vision for the creation of UDAGAN’s music! With this album, we plan to release a fully illustrated book on the cosmogonic mythology of the Sakha, written by Saydyy Kuo. The first draft of the text for the book is completed and the illustrations are in progress.
These 2020 goals are very exciting to us — we have been working on writing the album and book over the last 2 years, and our hearts and souls have gone into their creation. It will be a lot more work, but we are passionate to do it!
Thanks for listening and we really, seriously appreciate any help at all.
Oscar and Saydyy Kuo South
The art we are making is for everyone and we are making sure to present it online digitally as well as at concerts. We have recently launched our new website at UDAGANuniverse.com — a hub for all our work.
We are fundraising in order to replace live performance equipment that was damaged at a recent concert. The loss of this equipment prevents us performing future live performances, which make up a large part of our ability to support ourselves financially.
To replace our critical equipment and be able to resume live performances, we need to reach around £650. We have set our goal to £1000 — beyond this, donations will go towards production and publishing costs for the upcoming work set out in the detailed plan at the bottom of this text. Anything surplus will be put towards developing our business at a faster pace and bringing our cultural offering to a wider audience. We are really pushing with everything we can give these days and any available resources allow us to create better content, achieve our planned goals quicker and to organise more elaborate performances on a wider national radius.
Who are we?
Individually, we are Saydyy Kuo Fedorova and Oscar South from the Sakha Republic and from the UK, we are making music and writing, teaching and sharing our knowledge. We are now based in Sheffield, UK. Our UDAGANuniverse project is our passion and vision in life — we believe that it is extremely important to undertake this work, as Sakha is a very unique and hidden culture in the world that we have both individually and together dedicated years of research towards building our personal knowledge. It is important to share the true and unique beauty of places like this in an honest and ethically representative way that can be treasured by the wider world for generations. Saydyy Kuo is one of the few, maybe the only native Sakha artist/performer based in the west who is able to travel freely in europe while also being qualified and experienced enough to accurately present this cultural knowledge.
Why are we fundraising?
At a recent concert, Oscar had left his live performance equipment set up on the stage as normal after our soundcheck. Saydyy Kuo was still standing on the stage while other artists from the event were preparing their equipment. Suddenly, a large wooden board that had been standing at the back of the stage fell directly onto the table where our performance equipment was set up and ready for the concert. We did not see how the board fell but heard a loud bang. As Saydyy Kuo was standing on the stage she was hit by the falling board -- very thankfully (and most importantly) the impact with the equipment table had absorbed enough momentum that she wasn't hurt. Also thankfully, nobody else was hit.
Our performance equipment was not so fortunate and sustained heavy physical damage. Sadly on inspection the next day, we found that the laptop used as the main ‘brain’ in our live performance was no longer functioning, and in addition to the physical damage (which Oscar was able to partly glue back in place) several of the hardware ports necessary for our performances were non-operational.
It is a painful setback to us, as our life been thrown about in the political winds in recent times — due to modern British residency laws we've had to relocate country two times in the past 3 years, in order to secure our long term residency here. This has destroyed the self-employed businesses as performers which had supported us before having to leave the UK, and on returning has left us very financially vulnerable -- we're still in the early stages of rebuilding our life in the UK and we’ve been very careful to maintain the important tools which allow us to provide for ourselves and grow. We have no savings or ability at this moment to replace the damaged equipment.
While living in Ireland, in order to earn enough money to live in Dublin’s rental crisis, Oscar was playing Upright Bass seven days a week at times — through pushing himself too hard physically he has sustained a chronic injury to his right forearm that has limited his ability to practice his profession. On returning to the UK, he is now undergoing physiotherapy in order to be able to work professionally full time again in the future. We are able to continue our performance work due to his adoption of music technology and ‘Live Coding’ (the art of live performance with programming languages). The recent damage to our equipment prevents us from taking on these performances until a time that we can raise the funding to replace it.
During our early days back in the UK, we have been working as hard as we can to perform, write, create as well as applying to every possible funding opportunity through arts council and other private sources. We are waiting on the results of multiple applications, but our worry is that we will not be able to fulfil the objectives of these projects without our performance equipment (these kinds of grants usually do not allow budgeting for the purchasing of new personal equipment).
In addition to replacing the equipment required to resume our live performance work, this is the 6-8 month plan for our upcoming work, which this campaign will help to fund:
Immediately, we wish to give something back to our funders as soon as possible. Saydyy Kuo would like to post a personally hand made, embroidered patch out to those who support us. As these patches are hand made, they are time consuming to embroider, so it is only possible to offer this reward for donations of £30 or more. The patch for supporters is a unique design variation that will not be available by any other means. We also have a large archive of footage from concerts, rehearsals and jam sessions over the last 5 years. So far it’s been sitting on an external hard drive, but we would like to make it available for our supporters. Oscar will be going through this material and preparing it in a format that is conveniently viewable, and we will make it accessible for our funders. There are numerous concert and many hours of footage in here!
In the close future (by late summer), we plan to together post regular videos of performance of our art onto YouTube and other platforms. The material for these performances is partly built from ancient cultural music that has been retrieved from archives then carefully developed, to reveal it’s full beauty. It will also be partly contemporary music, which we create from all our collective inspiration. Here is an early example.
During this time, we will also digitally re-release Saydyy Kuo’s ‘Aptaakh Khomus’ album, first published in 2014.
By spring 2020, we plan to release a brand new album (presently written, but not yet recorded) album by UDAGAN. It will be engineered and produced by Oscar. This album is the first iteration of our true vision for the creation of UDAGAN’s music! With this album, we plan to release a fully illustrated book on the cosmogonic mythology of the Sakha, written by Saydyy Kuo. The first draft of the text for the book is completed and the illustrations are in progress.
These 2020 goals are very exciting to us — we have been working on writing the album and book over the last 2 years, and our hearts and souls have gone into their creation. It will be a lot more work, but we are passionate to do it!
Thanks for listening and we really, seriously appreciate any help at all.
Oscar and Saydyy Kuo South
Fundraising team: UDAGANuniverse (2)
Oscar South
Organizer
Saydyko South
Team member
