Beqa Ungiadze - სადგური [Station] (Phantom Limb)

What Your Ears Say & The Cover Looks Like

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What We Say

Monday morning is a natural moment to question life choices and the nature of reality, but rather than dwelling on such matters, and as it's probably too early for a drink or to enter into any altered states, could I recommend exploring the otherworldly minimalism of Beqa Ungiadze's new EP for Phantom Limb as a work friendly temporary reprieve, by which time a coffee and breakfast of choice should have buoyed your spirits no end.

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What The Release Notes Say

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.”

CREDITS
artwork by Giorgi Shengelia
mastered by Tornike Gvelesiani

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For more electronic reality disengagement don your finest headphones & hit play on the Slowtronic Playlist sometime: