Review Dance

Gacha Bakradze

Forget

Oath • 2023

Gacha Bakradze, probably Georgia’s most famous club music producer at the moment, likes to return to the vibrant sounds that have been labelled IDM since the 1990s. This is not the fault of Bakradze, who makes the subject so convincingly his own that one feels compelled to give a mere hint of a genre for the sake of rough orientation. However, this hardly does justice to the tracks, whose sounds and rhythms wriggle around the room like tentacles, constantly twisting over the course of four to six minutes. Gacha Bakradze doesn’t offer guitar solos like he used to, instead he creates soft, artificial melodies and harmonies, which he mutates again and again, even when the beat, for example on »Form«, is fairly strictly stuck to. Every single track on »Forget« sounds as if nothing is happening at random, despite the delight in variation, but rarely in such a way that you could predict exactly which event would follow the next. Gacha Bakradze has a marvellous ability to keep things open and slightly in the air, and to make the path he is on seem completely natural. That some eighties synth arpeggios form the basis of a repeated question (»What can I say?«) on »What You Say« is also a matter of course.