It is always a treat when musicians take full advantage of the possibilities afforded by live performances, as Anushka Chkheidze and Robert Lippok have in The Sky Was Out of Tune. The younger Georgian electronic producer encountered the Berliner multimedia veteran during a Tiblisi workshop in 2019, and the two have been frequent collaborators ever since. The Sky Was Out of Tune is their second collaborative album, out on Morr Music.
Whereas Uncontrollable Thought was the result of private improvisational sessions in a simple rehearsal space, The Sky Was Out of Tune derives from a public performance at Berlin’s Neue Nationalgalerie for the 2025 Festival of Future Now. The duo has continued slowly refining and iterating upon the material since then, performing versions of it for the Superboooth26 concert series (also in Berlin) and at the ZiMMT concert hall in Leipzig.
The digital version of this compact, 27-minute album is a continuous mix split into tracks numbered I through VIII. The mix opens with shakers, glockenspiel, and amplified room sound that loop and thicken into a wash of sound. While this segment is admittedly short, it triggers many associations. Chkheidze and Lippok both have extensive formal musical training and a background in the avant-garde, so it is likely that Alvin Lucier’s landmark 1969 sound art piece I Am Sitting In A Room and Vladimir Ussachevesky’s 1956 composition A Poem In Cycles And Bells figure as at least subconscious influences. Ussachevesky because a similar handling of bell-like timbres figures as a leitmotif throughout the album and Lucier because of how his experiment in amplified feedback is updated through the fine control afforded by modern digital signal processing, the sounds retaining their specificity and richness instead of mulching into a tinny drone.
Chkheidze’s voice is another leitmotif in the album, one that is alternately pitched, looped, filtered, and buried by electronics. A wordless vocal sample billows throughout “II” only to descend into a wall of static on “III” (a standout track for fans of Tim Hecker-esque walls of oceanic drone), subtly return on “IV,” and reemerges with a renewed sharpness on “VI” pitched up, stuttering, and draped in arpeggiation. The track gradually gains energy, cresting as something almost dancefloor-ready, the more percussive elements that are not quite snare or hi-hat gradually fading into the mix rather than inserted as a drop.
The Sky Was Out of Tune advances with a sense of purpose, constantly rearranging and rediscovering its constituent parts in ways that speak to the skill of its composers and the strength of their collaborative instincts, be it the meso-level within performances or the macro-level between them. It is obvious that theirs will be a durable working relationship for years to come. (Marcello Ursic)
