Listening to Crude Walnut Taste, it is tempting to focus on Giorgi Koberidze‘s compositional rigour: the electroacoustic transformations, the dialogue with Western classical forms, the microscopic attention paid to the behaviour of sound. Those elements are certainly there, but they risk obscuring something equally important. This is a remarkably funny album. After all, the opening track, “Horsing Around”, gives the game away immediately.
Crude Walnut Taste is not funny in the sense of parody or quotation, but in the pleasure it takes in constantly wrong-footing the listener who might be expecting an academic work. A gesture suddenly changes direction, a rhythmic idea gathers momentum before being interrupted by an entirely different line of thought. Titles such as “Quasi Sonata-Allegro”, “Experimental, electro-accoustic, spatial audio, Georgian, sound design, Tbilisi, ambient – Adagio” and “Tbilisian Faux-Valse” gesture towards familiar classical forms, but only long enough for Koberidze to dismantle them.
As the composer explains in the accompanying interview, these references belong to an earlier period of his practice, when his relationship with classical composition was more direct and, in his own words, more “primitive”. And this is the paradox at the heart of the album. On the one hand it sounds almost primitive, built from raw acoustic matter; on the other, the speed with which ideas appear, collide and disappear constantly propels it forward. Without resorting to the tired label of “retro-futurism”, the image that kept returning while I listened was Georgiy Daneliya’s Kin-dza-dza!. The 1986 Soviet science-fiction comedy follows two ordinary citizens transported to a distant galaxy where advanced civilisation appears to have regressed into something primitive. The film was, of course, scored by the late Georgian composer Giya Kancheli, yet there is a comparable measure of irony and lightness of touch running through both works.
That playfulness extends to the sound world itself. Much of the album is constructed from recordings of the doli, the Georgian drum, chosen precisely because it carries no melodic baggage. Rather than treating the instrument as a symbol of national identity, Koberidze breaks it down into tiny fragments that become the raw material for an unexpectedly broad range of textures. The result is music that remains unmistakably physical. Even the electronics rarely transform those sounds outright.
However, what remains most surprising, is the album’s speed, and not just its manic kinetic energy, but also the speed with which ideas appear only to mutate. Very little is allowed to settle. Musical thoughts collide with a kind of controlled frenzy that recalls someone thinking faster than they can speak. And yet, despite this restless surface, the music never feels erratic. It remains playful without becoming flippant, rigorous without turning solemn. That is a rare balance, and one that gives Crude Walnut Taste its distinctive character.
To help us crack the walnut, we approached Giorgi Koberidze directly.
Crude Walnut Taste began life as a 20-channel spatial work commissioned for MONOM’s 4D Sound system before being reimagined in stereo for this release. How did the process of translating such a physically immersive piece into a two-channel format affect your relationship to the material? Were there aspects of the original spatial architecture that had to be sacrificed, or did the reduction reveal new details that were previously hidden?
I actually already knew how the piece would sound in stereo, because I don’t have a twenty-channel speaker setup at my studio. So while working on it, I was composing in stereo from the start, imagining what sound could fit where. We then spent two weeks at MONOM Studio in Berlin, where we had the chance to rearrange the piece, add things, and sometimes exclude things, but the core idea of the music was already written in stereo, and that’s what made it possible to translate the twenty-channel piece back down.
Of course, a lot is lost in that reduction, but the core idea is still there. It works almost the same as watching an IMAX film in a normal movie theatre: whatever really matters stays in focus, stays at the centre. What the IMAX size gives you additionally is maybe more air, more space, something that isn’t crucial to understanding the film itself. I’d say it’s the same with this piece: what really matters is still there in stereo. The MONOM system just gives more space and some additional ideas, but I wouldn’t say the piece is focused only on those twenty channels.
Generally, my belief is that good music can be played on a single-string guitar, even if it was written for a hundred-channel system, as long as the idea itself is strong, and as long as the music matters more than the form. If we’re not talking about a piece where form is more important than the music, then I think it’s easily translatable anywhere.
Across Forests, Tales, Cities, Forests, its Epilogue, and now Crude Walnut Taste, the doli seems to occupy an increasingly central role in your work. On this album, the instrument is extensively sampled, dissected and reconstructed through micro-editing techniques. What drew you to the doli as the primary sonic source, and how did transforming it electronically alter your perception of an instrument so deeply embedded in Georgian musical culture?
I use the doli because it has no pitch. My problem with using tonal instruments from the Caucasus – the duduk, say, or the chuniri – is that they come with already-written melodies and harmonies, and I find it very hard to know how to use that material in modern music. At some point I decided I would never touch existing melody or harmony, because it’s already there, it’s already enough. It doesn’t need anything from me, or from anyone, to be transformed.
The doli is interesting because you can use it without ever touching a melody or a harmony, it gives you a lot of possibility to take micro-material from it instead. But anyone who understands sound and sound design knows that, basically, you can turn any sound into anything. The instrument you choose is just a source for material, and from there you can go anywhere; it’s really about what physical material you’re comfortable working with. In my case, it’s the doli simply because it’s here – you’re in Georgia, there are dolis everywhere, you can just grab one. Also, the quality of that sound already carries something very familiar to every Georgian. By using it, you’re lightly touching this historical heritage, but it doesn’t give you licence to overuse it – to base your music on something already precious to Georgians and then claim it as your own.
Some people use old melodies, traditional melodies especially, and I’m not against using old pop music in modern work. But when it comes to traditional music, it’s more delicate. So even when we do use tonal instruments like the duduk, we’re very careful never to cross into an already-written melody from Georgian folk music.
Earlier works such as Forests, Tales, Cities, Forests felt almost cartographic, mapping landscapes, memories and imagined geographies through graphic scores, ensembles and field recordings. Crude Walnut Taste seems more focused on texture, gesture and acoustic matter itself. Do you see this album as a departure from those narrative and spatial concerns, or as another way of exploring the relationship between place, memory and sound?
Also, several track titles—”Tbilisian Faux-Valse”, “Quasi Sonata-Allegro”, “Experimental, electro-accoustic, spatial audio, Georgian, sound design, Tbilisi, ambient – Adagio”—appear to reference established musical forms, yet the music itself constantly undermines expectations through fragmentation, electroacoustic processing and playful subversion. To what extent are these titles intended as affectionate dialogues with classical traditions, and how important is humour or irony within your compositional practice?
First, some context: Crude Walnut Taste was actually written much earlier than Forests, Tales, Cities, Forests – about five years earlier. What the two albums share is a certain playfulness with, and closeness to, classical music. In 2019, when I wrote Crude Walnut Taste, I was a much younger student of classical composition, so the way I integrated that knowledge into the album was more direct, less hidden, even a bit more “primitive” – the melodic and harmonic moments lean more overtly classical. That’s also where the track titles come from, which I actually chose later, closer to the album’s release: names like “Tbilisian Faux-Valse” or “Quasi Sonata-Allegro.” They’re not literal sonata-allegros or waltzes, of course, but the mood and the harmonic gestures really are drawn from there. Looking back, I wouldn’t use these references so directly today – in Forests, Tales, Cities, Forests, similar techniques are used much more hidden, on a deeper, more background level.
So, from that perspective, this earlier album carries a bit of irony, a bit of humour, and that’s something I’m quite fond of. I’ve always wanted to find a way to put humour inside music – it’s genuinely hard to do. My friend and musical collaborator Luka, the other half of Awwwaea, always used to come up with wonderfully funny musical ideas; I was constantly amazed at how he could make our whole friend group laugh for hours over a single musical idea. I’d say this album carries a little of that same spirit.
At the same time, it’s a very personal record. Even the title comes from childhood: crude walnut taste refers to eating very raw, unripe walnuts as kids – cracking them open with your fingers while they’re still green, watching your fingers turn green and then black from the juice. That taste takes me straight back to those childhood memories: sometimes fast, sometimes a little sad, but mostly very bright, full of colourful images and imagination – but still raw, because the sounds themselves are raw. After I finished the album, a friend told me at a small concert that it felt like “music made for sounds no one else is using.” I loved that description, because the sounds you hear really are raw – almost taken straight from the computer as they are, with very little additional sound design or processing layered on top.
(Gianmarco Del Re)
