Improvisation at Full Swing in Vake Park Night Club
Backstage 76 in Vake Park offers an ongoing series of concerts, giving you the chance to discover new faces and setting new musical standards in a variety of genres in an art café-like setting. On January 24, the duo of Davit Datunashvili and Irakli Abramishvili offered a show of experimental instrumental music to an avid audience there, one of their once-monthly performances.
Datunashvili and Abramishvili started their collaboration in 2014. Since then they have recorded two albums and performed at various events. They play improvised, experimental music, which includes noise, ambient, drone and rhythmical elements from many genres. The duo uses guitars as the main source of their live performance, mixing the sound with other electronic instruments and various field recordings.
“I used to work with bands but now I have a solo career,” Datunashvili told GEORGIA TODAY. “This latest project acknowledges that even such ‘non-musical’ things as friction can become music, too. Of course, the direction of noise in music is well-known and we don’t claim to be inventing anything new- our main niche is improvisation. We are very happy that Backstage 76 opened, as there aren’t many venues for musicians in Georgia, and I can say with every confidence that this is one of the best.”
“Davit is a producer and I’m a sound designer- and we have totally different styles of working,” Abramishvili told GEORGIA TODAY. “We work together in order to understand each other; we never know what we’ll end up with, but that’s the law of the experimental genre. The emotion of one musician is good, but the emotions of two are better,” he says, adding that the main thing for them is the environment, in other words, the acoustics of the place they are playing in. “We plan to go on tour, as our music fits specific festivals rather than a general audience. It’s not dance music and so needs a certain amount of concentration in the listening. Music is something that I love most of all. I can play for 12-14 hours a day. Even my thoughts become better with music.”
I daresay music is not noise, just as singing is not screaming. However, if we look at the work of this duo from the point of view of art being the reflection of reality, they are more than suited to the aggressive modern world. The question is: do we need exact reflections in this already crazy world? Does art not become malicious in this case? Every genre of music has a right to exist, though such experiments are far from positive in their ambition to pacify and relax. This very music is made for people having a need to discharge, popular everywhere, especially in the West. Those who are filled with aggression will probably like this duo more than those who are searching for peace and anticipating positive emotions from their art. One can hear them once a month at Backstage 76. The most interesting point: one never knows, like the musicians, what they will listen to…
The entrance is from Abashidze Street into Vake Park. The concerts are usually held from 8pm to 11pm or midnight.
Maka Lomadze