Rezo Kiknadze: Three sound accompaniments of the "Rustaveli" Metro escalator

The preferential differences of all six jury members proved to be utterly pertinent to the peculiar and sometimes radically varied approaches of each of the competition submissions to the environment that had to be created as an audio installation, sounding for weeks and months around the longest escalator of the Tbilisi metro.


The variety of tastes, aesthetic viewpoints and technical considerations led to that diverse spectrum of applicants' artistic statements, from sparse textures saturated with short and prompt accents, over sound reflections composed of noise samples of the subway itself or electronic transformations of Georgian polyphony, to rare nature sounds intentionally contradicting the metro environment, or even the musak sonorities of supermarkets and elevators.


Three winners were revealed: entirely distinct approaches, musical backgrounds, and thus unique artistic choice.


Tornike Margvelashvili's intention was, to construct the fundamental layer of the work with pre-recorded sounds of the Rustaveli metro and enfold this harsh industrial environment, fused with the monotony of live metro itself,  by fragmentary textures of quite contrasting Georgian traditional tunes, thus evoking some mystical sensation of a kind of "passage," "descension and ascension" etc.


Nino Davadze's forethought in using earlier field recordings and juxtaposing the sounds of rare endemic birds to the closed and muted bourdon of the metro, proved to be very effective: a subtle, nostalgic, and thought-provoking artistic image of a human gradually moving away from the sun, the forest, the nature...


Nika Japaridze consciously and unadorned prefers to arrange the sounds of the metro and the rest of the sound entourage in his installation in a way that the passerby (with both the symbolic and literal meaning of this word!) perceives and yet does not note it, as if another common omnipresent public space muzak was playing ignored by busy shoppers and self-focused “consumers”...


All of this is sounding - when going down and up, and, interestingly, in different ways: going down (by the right-most escalator), the two rows of speakers, both near and far, should be heard mainly from the left, but, reflected in the arch and mixed in the live noises of metro itself and chatter, it mainly surrounds us as one viscid mass. Going up, we find ourselves between two rows of speakers - the audibility is clearer, but the live sounds seem to reinforce the conflict and tense up the auditory expectation.


Expecting any conventional panoramic or ambisonic effect here would be out of place; on the contrary, the listener moves between these twenty-four speakers under conditions of continuous altering of distance and audibility, which transforms this changing, mobile and turbulent environment, loaded with any sort of audio material, into an extended sonic adventure, a kind of acoustic passage. It is probably the most difficult to maintain balance in such a space where several permanent noises (for example, the buzzing of the old escalator) exceed the normal levels of a well-maintained metro in their intensity and thus drown out a bit too much that basic sound environment crucial to the installation and intended to show the individuality of each of the three works. At he same time, the sound of the train commutation, on the contrary, although much more potent, suites perfectly and contours all the rest of monotony.


In any case, the passerby (in both definitions!), willingly or unwillingly, knowingly or unknowingly, becomes an experiencer and a partaker of art, which cannot happen in public space any other way.





Rezo Kiknadze

Composer and performer Rezo Kiknadze was born in Tbilisi in 1960. In 1982, he graduated from Tbilisi State University with a major in Classical Philology. In 1986 - 1990, he studied at Tbilisi State Conservatory at the faculty of composition. In 1991, he was awarded a scholarship from the Liana Isakadze Foundation, which enabled him to study composition at the Lübeck Academy of Music in Germany. Later, in 2011, he attained a docent degree in electronic composition from the same institution.

Throughout his career, Kiknadze has been actively involved in various musical endeavors, collaborating with diverse ensembles spanning jazz, new music, free improvisation, and electro-acoustic music. Noteworthy among his collaborations are his contributions to the modern ballet company "TanzOrtNord," 2000-2005, his involvement with the free improvisation ensemble "Resolution Group", 2000-2003, and his leadership of the improvisation ensemble "Consilia" since 2011. His contributions to the field have been recognized with several accolades, including the Marie-Louise-Imbuch Foundation composition prize in 1993 and the Braunschweig New Academy composition prize in 1997. Notably, he served as the rector of the Tbilisi State Conservatory from 2011 to 2019.