The Waveform #020: Basements of Tbilisi
Tbilisi kept dancing without its club. With Substation preparing to reopen, the network built in its absence has to decide what it wants next.
A line from Silas's notebook has been stuck to my monitor all week, said by a promoter in a stairwell in Tbilisi: 'The club was never the building. We would still like the building back.' Two years of managing without it, and the thing people describe missing is not the room or the rig. It is the address, the one place you could give a stranger without also having to explain who vouched for them.
Scene Report: Tbilisi's Basement Techno Renaissance
Silas Reyes on the crews who kept a city dancing while Substation sat dark: borrowed generators, one rig carried between four basements, and a door policy passed along by word of mouth because nothing was ever advertised. Now that the club is preparing to open its doors again, the interesting question is what becomes of the network that grew up in its absence. Nobody quoted in the piece thinks it should simply be absorbed.
Also this week
- What We Lose When the Venue Becomes a Condo. Dario Fontaine on the economics of a 300-capacity room and how agent-of-change rules quietly decide who is still allowed to make noise.
- The $80 Mic That Refuses to Die. If you are recording anything in a basement this summer, start with the cheap dynamic rather than the delicate condenser you are frightened of.
One more thing
Somebody filmed forty seconds of a single handclap in the Substation stairwell last month, on a phone, with the light off, purely to hear the decay. It is a terrible video and a very good recording: a little over two seconds of tail on bare concrete, then a door shutting somewhere below. Half the records I love are trying to fake that tail with a plugin, and it costs nothing to go and clap in a stairwell yourself.
Back next Friday. Ada
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