Beqa Ungiadze - ს ა დ გ უ რ ი [Station] (2023)

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 ს​ა​დ​გ​უ​რ​ი [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.”

Ს​ა​დ​გ​უ​რ​ი 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.”