Scene Report: Tbilisi's Basement Techno Renaissance

At ten past four on a Sunday morning, the pavement on a side street in Didube is warm. Not from the sun, which is still forty minutes away, but from a ventilation grate at ankle height breathing out the low end of a kick drum and the smell of two hundred people. Nine of us stand in a line nobody is managing. Nobody talks. Below the sofa shop that sells three colours of sofa is the best room in the city, and it does not have a name on the door because it does not have a door.

Substation has been closed for two years this month. When it shut in June 2024 over a licence dispute and a fire exit that appeared on no plan anyone could produce, the consensus abroad was that Tbilisi had lost its scene. What actually happened is that the scene lost its address and kept everything else.

Two years without a front door

By the count of the people I asked, eleven crews are running regular nights in this city with no permanent venue between them. They work out of a wine cellar, two underground car parks, a former printing works in Isani, a boat club on the river, and the function room of a hotel whose manager takes cash and wants the tables back by nine.

Nino Beridze has run the cellar nights under the name Marani since 2023, and she describes the logistics as the actual art form. "Substation was a building, so everyone decided the building was the thing," she says, in a stairwell where a conversation is possible. "For two years I have been the building. I find the room, I find the power, I find the person whose brother has a van. The music is the easy part."

The address goes out at eight in the evening on the day, to a channel with a little over three thousand members. Before that there is a poster with a time and no place, which is a system this city has been running, on and off, for thirty years.

Who owns the speakers

Ask who runs the scene here and you will start an argument. Ask who owns the PA and you get one name. Gio Tsereteli, forty-six, spent eleven years maintaining cinema sound in Rustavi, and the four eighteen-inch subs that turn a cellar into a club were built in his brother's garage in Gldani out of birch ply, around a crossover he rewound himself. The rig lives in a Ford Transit with a taped-up passenger window and goes to whichever crew has booked it: 250 lari a night, plus fuel.

He stays until the room is empty, partly because the amps are worth more than the van and partly for a reason he explains while coiling cable at half past six. "Making it loud is nothing. Making it quiet at six, in the right order, so the street does not notice the difference - that is the job."

A second, smaller system belongs to Third Shift, five people who crowdfunded 4,800 lari for it in 2024 and now lend it to anyone who will come and collect it. Between those two rigs, every night in this report was audible. It is the part that never makes the documentary: two vans, one man who understands crossovers, and a shared understanding that the speakers do not belong to a promoter.

The cellar helps. It is a brick barrel vault with no parallel surfaces and a floor that is permanently slightly wet, which is why a rig this size behaves in here and would embarrass itself in a square room of the same volume. Cities and their buildings do half the mixing, as we argued at length last winter, and Tbilisi's housing stock has been quietly subsidising its music for a century.

The door, the metro and the bakery at half five

Entry is 30 lari before one in the morning, 40 after, 20 with a student card and nothing at all if you helped carry. Ana Kvirikashvili works the door with a paper list, a head torch and an open box of earplugs, and turns away about one person in twenty. "I am not deciding who is cool," she says. "I am deciding who is going to be a problem for Marina upstairs."

Marina Kapanadze, retired teacher, second floor, has keys to the cellar and has twice ended a night early by walking down and pulling the power at the meter. The deal she negotiated is precise: nothing below sixty hertz after six, nobody smoking in the courtyard, and her son gets in free.

The metro closes at midnight and reopens at six, and that single fact shapes a night here more than any booking. The room fills between twenty past eleven and five past twelve, then holds. A taxi across town at four is fifteen lari, affordable once and not twice, so most people commit to the whole thing. At six it empties in one movement. At half five Tazo opens the bakery on the corner, and the queue for lobiani and the queue leaving the cellar are the same queue, which remains my favourite thing about this city.

What happens when Substation comes back

It is coming back. Nobody will give me a date on the record - the new owners applied for a licence in the spring, there is scaffolding on the loading bay, and a man in a hi-vis jacket said "autumn" in the tone of someone who has said it before. The room is being rebuilt at around four hundred capacity with an isolated ceiling.

Not everyone wants it. "We learned how to work without a building," Beridze says. "A building is a landlord, a licence and a bar target. I am not certain I want to be a tenant again."

Keti Sharashidze of Third Shift is blunter, and does the arithmetic for me on the back of a flyer: a hundred and thirty people at 30 lari is 3,900 lari, and after the rig, the bar stock, two door staff and three artists, a good night clears about 600. Four hundred capacity changes that sum, and with it what this city can afford to book. It also puts everything back in one address that somebody else owns, which is the lesson of every closure we have covered this year.

At 06:04 the bass stops mid-bar - Gio taking the subs out first, exactly as advertised - and the club becomes a cellar again, brick and damp and smaller than it was five minutes ago. Outside it is fully light. The grate is still warm.