PSALM011: სადგური [Station] by Beqa Ungiadze

Georgian electronic musician Beqa Ungiadze debuts on Phantom Limb’s Spirituals imprint with a beautiful new album of gauzy ambient minimalist works to represent humanity’s eternal migration.

Having recently relocated (“completely spontaneously”) from his native Georgia to a new life and new home in London, solo musician Beqa Ungiadze explores the experiences of replanting long-held roots and statelessness with სადგური [Eng: Station]. Its dusty, effervescent, subtly rhythmic instrumental pieces mutate and evolve, in slow-mo, with a yearning prettiness that points to a deconstructed, cubist take on IDM or an electrified Reich.

With alternately vibrant and hazy synthesis, Beqa Ungiadze’s music marries blissed-out, beatlessness with a gritty film of melancholic memory-distortion.

Beqa explains that “I had no thematic plans for the album, just the intense emotions I experience in everyday life.” He tells us: “the album is a message to other people whose experiences and feelings are similar that they are not alone, that everything we experience, whether it is good or bad, teaches us something.”

Სადგური opens with “დრო” [Eng: Time], whose popping whorls of synth bubbles swirl and arpeggiate like a babbling stream. It reflects the strange passage of time - extending and compressing in a dreamlike mist, deftly graceful on the surface but underpinned by an unearthly weirdness at its heart. Following, “პოეზია” [Eng: Poetry] builds on corroded reverberous wirework with pulsing chirrups in the high frequencies, as if a pastoral scene rendered mechanical. And towards the end of the album, “გზა რომლითაც შენ მელაპარაკები” [Eng: The Way You Talk To Me] employs a synthetic storytelling mode to juxtapose intimacy and technology, rooted in semi-robotic science fiction. Uniting the album is a common theme - human migration. “We are always on the move,” Beqa writes. “We change apartments, streets, cities, we're always on some road and trying to reach some destination.”

Tracklist

1.	დრო [Time]	4:35

2.	პოეზია [Poetry]	3:30

3.	პიროსის გამარჯვება [Pyrrhic Victory]	6:23

4.	სირცხვილით სავსე უდაბნო [The Desert Full of Disgrace]	3:33

5.	საბნის ქვეშ [Under The Blanket]	3:41

6.	ნიაღვარი [Downpour]	4:16

7.	გზა რომლითაც შენ მელაპარაკები [The Way You Talk To Me]	3:26

8.	უმიზეზო შიში [Fear Has No Cause]	4:44

Credits

released February 24, 2023

artwork by Giorgi Shengelia
mastered by Tornike Gvelesiani

License