TBA - Annulé

Miracles of music worth consuming: when in the soul of the tireless seeker of novelty at all costs the intimate conviction takes hold that everything has already been done and heard, along comes someone to pull out of the hat an album that forces a rethink. Back to square one, but without going overboard.

As we were saying, midtempo is running out of breath, indeed it's stopped breathing altogether, minimal techno has been served up to us in every possible way, glitch lies in its death throes, and the term trip-hop now belongs to the vocabulary of a bygone era: is all that really true?

Perhaps it's because little in the way of trendy music makes it to Tbilisi, so nobody there can really be influenced by it (an exotic theory, I won't rule it out, but it's plausible, don't you think?), or more likely it's because the twenty-five-year-old Georgian Tusia Beridze, aka TBA, has listened to just enough music to draw its blurriest images into herself and hand them back to us through a thoroughly personal lens.

"Annulé" is the result of painstaking stitching-together: a long, composite record, running over seventy minutes, which certainly demands patient dedication but repays it just as generously, roaming through the varied languages of electronic music, ranging across subgenres without ever losing coherence, keeping its guiding thread clearly visible throughout.

It's both a challenge and a thesis defence: no other comparison comes to mind, since the task of gathering under one common denominator sonic distances that appear so wide apart has been fully accomplished.

Without wanting to take anything away from the charming and talented Georgian artist, it's fair to assume that reaching this result owed a great deal to that true minimal techno authority who goes by the name of Thomas Brinkmann, who besides running the label that licensed the record, also handled the production.

In light of this, it's hardly surprising that the album opens with an electronic progressive instrumental, "Beba Plays", where the virtuosic repetition of the piano directly evokes the masters of classical minimalist avant-garde, only for us to witness, right after, a sudden shift into techno-ambient recitation with "I", in which TBA displays a warm vocal sensuality: two atmospheres so far apart, yet giving off remarkably similar scents.

A sensuality that is, by contrast, deliberately absent from the trip hop of "B>lan", which by steering clear of the cliché four-on-the-floor beat and the bewitching vocal, opting instead for a whispered detachment, manages to bring out its own distinctive character.

Another element that helps preserve stylistic cohesion is the measured use of glitch, often present but never invasive — as in the bare-bones techno-trance of "Tuesd", the twilight mood for technological hearts of "Okean K", and the robotic hip-hop melodicism of the title track.

Night recurs and pursues us, showing itself throughout the whole journey: sometimes dark, urban and claustrophobic, as in the breathless ride conjured by "Walk"; sometimes cold and still, as if observed from a darkened window ("Airoports"); and sometimes calm and melancholic ("Smashed").

Amid watery tones in black-and-grey — hence the forays into Kraftwerk-like territory in "Soshi", whose keyboard seems like an emanation of "The Hall Of Mirrors" — other spaces are embroidered in, well suited to avant-garde and improvisation: so while on one hand we find in "Dread" a sort of reprise of "Beba Plays", on the other an uncertain pulsing heart sketches out the underground, instrumental trance of "Zinavs".

The farewell thank-you comes courtesy of the melodic cascade of "Urs", and of Tusia whispering in our ear, in the faintest thread of voice, all the sweetness she's capable of. The melancholic, detached sweetness of an artist whose radiant future is easy to foresee.

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30/04/2026