It’s not easy to get hold of Anushka Chkheidze at the beginning of 2025. In the summer of 2024, we met at Berlin’s Pop-Kultur festival, where the Georgian musician, who had travelled from her adopted home in Utrecht, was preparing to play a live set that evening. Her impressive fourth album is still relatively new. On Clean Clear White, the 1997-born musician presents herself as an experimental explorer of spatial sound. She recorded the album in the spring of 2021, using piano and laptop to capture the acoustics of the pandemic-stricken rooms of the University of Basel’s Biocentre with great sensitivity. She also collaborated with a vocal ensemble from the renowned Schola Cantorum Basiliensis, a school of early music. This album underlines what the scene has been whispering for years: that an extraordinary talent is about to emerge into the light of the international avant-garde.

Georgian Nightmare

Now, in the winter of 2024/25, these reflections feel like echoes from another world. Anushka Chkheidze’s world is now dominated by political resistance. Today, for example, there is another big cultural demonstration in Tbilisi, the capital of Georgia. For months, people from the theatre and music industries have been on strike against the authoritarian, anti-Western orientation of the ruling party, Georgian Dream, which won an absolute majority in the disputed autumn elections. Since then, the government has used violence and a compliant judiciary to break the massive resistance of civil society. Although smaller cultural institutions are no longer able to sustain the strike and the first bars and clubs have reopened, protests continue on a daily basis.

Anushka Chkheidze flew back to her native Caucasus for Christmas and has since made the protests her life’s work – at least as long as her schedule and finances allow. She rides the metro from protest to protest: from standing in solidarity with hunger-striking journalist Mzia Amaghlobeli in front of the courthouse, to demonstrating in front of public television, which is now little more than a propaganda machine, to picketing parliament, which in the eyes of the protesters no longer represents democratic values. In between, there are phone calls and planning meetings for projects in Central Europe, in Germany or the Netherlands, which now seem as distant as the prospect of a winter of protest seemed in the summer.

”I expected it to be intense, but I was too optimistic. I thought that more and more people had realised who this party was, that it would continue to move closer to Russia and adopt its authoritarian legislation. Everyone knew the regime. I thought we just had to be patient until the elections, because they would never get a majority,“ she says now, as I reach her, exhausted, in Tbilisi via Zoom for an update on her signature project for the Monheim Triennale 2025. She felt guilty about staying abroad for so long and watching her friends being beaten by the police on screen. ”Of course I’m scared now”, she says. But: “There is no other way.“

In Imereti

Her commitment to the protests stems from the influence of her country on her, both as a person and as an artist – an influence we discussed that distant Berlin summer. And that’s why, if you want to understand how the Anushka Chkheidze sound came to be – this exhilaratingly dense, always a little too much, this shimmering that feels too moving for static listening and too ethereal for dancing ecstasy – you have to leave behind Berlin, Utrecht and even Tbilisi, the home of her parents. The eye then drifts along the Chkherimela River in the Imereti region, leading to a small town nestled between high and low mountain ranges: Kharagauli.

”By the end of the Nineties, it was a different situation in Georgia. It was not a civil war, but there were struggles, no infrastructure, a lot of corruption. Everything was only for rich people. So my mother and my father decided that me and my brother and sister all had to go to the small town to live with my grandmother.“ Instead of the post-Soviet brutalist dreariness of the capital, young Anushka spent her childhood exploring nature with her grandparents. In hindsight, she made the most of the free courses for children at the local school. Driven by a thirst for knowledge, she threw herself into everything: music, dance, literature.

Dance in particular captured her heart. ”I love to dance, but not with people. I thought that I would be a dancer! When you are in a small town, there’s always something that you want, but is just not there. Like a swimming pool. Or for example street dance classes. So I started a dance group by myself at home, because we had a really big yard. And I was just DJing, mixing tracks for us. It was music from the radio or from my friends. Sometimes it was horrible electronic music. But I fell in love with deadmau5,“ she says.

This is a small but significant piece in the mosaic of Chkheidze’s sound, perhaps the most obvious. Although she has explored many experimental sounds since then, her fantastic 2020 debut Halfie is unmistakably IDM – Intelligent Dance Music in the spirit of Aphex Twin. It’s no coincidence that Robert Lippok of To Rococo Rot is one of her regular artistic collaborators.

It was also during those small-town years that she was introduced to the instrument that remains the foundation of many of her tracks. ”When I was three years old, my grandmother decided: this girl loves piano. So even before school I went to piano classes. And I liked it. But I hated notations and scores. I just wanted to play some songs. My first experience was when my grandfather taught me a little piece, a Georgian song called ‘Country’. I was a lucky child.“

Polyphonic Abstraction

This naturally leads to a third element that is central to Anushka Chkheidze’s sound, even if it is felt rather than immediately heard. So, a question for Anushka Chkheidze: what is a typical Georgian sound? The answer: ”Maybe just polyphony! When I was eleven years old, I started singing in a choir. We had a super funny choir leader. It was really important for my childhood to learn all those different harmonies in church music and folk songs. I don’t want to say, we have the best choir music in the world, but it is really polyphonic. You never sing just lead. You always have to wait for someone. You are always searching with your eyes who is going to sing with you. Polyphony is more than just one lead voice. It is very special to me until today. When I’m bored with all kinds of music, I always find something interesting from the Georgian folk archive.“

Of course, the love of Georgian polyphony doesn’t translate directly into the electro-folklore that emerged two decades ago in Shantel’s ‘Disco Partizani’, with its exotically nomadic blend of post-Soviet and Balkan romanticism, beats and brass. Nor do the various Latin variants à la Rosalía find their equivalent in the Chkheidze sound. ”Oh well,“ Anushka throws up her hands in mock horror. ”Not my long-term global trend! A lot of people are doing it the wrong way. It’s horrible. That’s why you don’t really feel it in my music, I try to avoid it. I’m not just taking folklore that I like and add some beats. That’s the easiest way to say: look, I’m connected to folklore!“

As demonstrated by her participation in protests against the new Georgian authoritarianism, Anushka Chkheidze has no interest in taking the path of least resistance. The influence of traditional Georgian choral music is more evident in the structures than in the textures of the sound. There’s no self-exoticism through sound – it’s all about maximum abstraction. ”It is more about the method, more about how I compose. I didn’t really have a classical education. Yes, I had piano lessons, but not with the most virtuoso teachers. So I had to find out by myself how to build a composition. It is the way I use instruments, how I build a bass sound, how it starts and how it ends, that is really connected to folklore“, explains the musician – instruments that run against each other. Atonal first voices. The bass that carries the melody, rather than just providing the groove, and becomes the leading voice when all the other instruments fall silent. ”I often get the feedback that my music is danceable, but it is not really danceable, just too much to sit down.“

On the Edge of the Comfort Zone

Why did she choose to settle in the Netherlands? Partly because the situation in Georgia, even before the turn to authoritarianism in the autumn, offered little stability for a young artist to make plans for the future. ”Would I make music, can I earn money there?“, she says. In Utrecht, however, she has found many of the small-city advantages she missed in Tbilisi, where her career took off. For example, she can cycle everywhere instead of relying on the metro. She mentions that she travels enough with her job. There are also too few opportunities in Georgia to satisfy her thirst for knowledge. Although she studied there with sound artist Natalia Beridze, she was ultimately drawn to the more specialised Institute for Music and Technology at the Utrecht School for the Arts for her masters degree.

For her signature project at the upcoming Monheim Triennale, she is once again pushing the boundaries of her comfort zone. In the summer she expressed a particular interest in working with choirs, explaining that she was tired of performing alone on stage and enjoyed hearing others bring her ideas to life through sound. At the time, she had just performed at the acclaimed opening concert of the Haldern Pop Festival on the Lower Rhine, where she interwove the singing of the Berlin choir Cantus Domus with minimalist synth tapestries in the village church. But now, as winter sets in, she announces an almost radical shift towards the soloist. Although the context remains sacred, Anushka Chkheidze will present Intricate Pipes – her first organ work – at the Monheim Triennale 2025.

The Organ from the Outside

Unlike choirs, organs are uncharted territory for Chkheidze. The polyphony of Georgian church music has no direct counterpart in instrumental music. ”I was always a big fan of organs, but more from the outside. I come from the Orthodox Church, and we don’t use organs. For me it was always something that is connected to the church“, she says. ”Working with the organ is a dream project, but I’m also afraid of it.“ 

From an armchair psychologist’s point of view, one could argue that the gravity of the situation in Georgia - the overarching drama of the protests - calls for an even more solemn sound. Or perhaps it’s simply that, during an artist residency in November, Anushka Chkheidze encountered the organ of the St.-Antonius Church in Düsseldorf-Oberkassel – an instrument that has repeatedly inspired composers of new music and the electronic avant-garde. French composer Maxime Denuc, who works at the intersection of baroque and rave, has written pieces for the St. Antonius organ, as has German composer Ulrich Kreppein, award winner of the 2012 Ernst von Siemens Music Prize.

The driving force behind all this is Markus Hinz, a dedicated church musician and composer who helped transform the organ into a platform for contemporary music over a decade ago. Since then he has continued to invite musicians to explore the possibilities of the instrument. The organ is equipped with a MIDI interface, allowing digital synth sounds and analogue acoustics to blend seamlessly. This fusion, along with her collaboration with Hinz, also inspired Anushka Chkheidze’s signature project. ”Intricate Pipes is about how an electric music composer could use a real organ“, she says, summarising the idea.

Minimalism, Complicated

In doing so, the project somewhat breaks out of the framework that seems to define the Monheim Triennale. “For me it was always the question: what will be the signature project, who do I want to collaborate with? Then I was thinking that I don’t want a concert with my famous favourite artist. Because I prefer to try the instrument that I always wanted to try and now is the moment. And I had the feeling that this is the moment to step out of my comfort zone in electronic music.”  

Recently, Chkheidze has noticed a certain lethargy in herself – though who could possibly relate to that right now, but okay. “Lately, I always wanted to do collaborations, not upgrade myself on the technicalities of my live set or my gear. How do I find the moment to upgrade myself as a live performer?”  That moment seems to have arrived. 

The organ’s MIDI interface serves as a starting point. Chkheidze programs her work in Ableton, connects her laptop to the organ and uses her digital expertise to shape the instrument’s sound. She can also play the organ’s manuals and pedals by hand. The sound must remain unmistakably Chkheidze. The word ‘intricate’ in the title transates to: complicated. Even if the characteristics of the instrument cannot fully reproduce the density of her music, it should not fall into the realm of classical organ minimalism. This is precisely the balance for which she is aiming. ”It will be more minimal. Because for me, all the time I put so many things into the tracks, like a drum always changing or different harmonies, I never like it to stop. It is intricate. That’s why I call this project Intricate Pipes – it will still be intricate, but on only one instrument.“ 

But how can the sound of an organ as unique as the one in St. Antonius Church in Düsseldorf be transferred to another context? After all, one of the unique features of an organ is that those who wish to hear it must come to the instrument, rather than the instrument being brought to where the audience is waiting. In any case, the organ in Monheim will not have a MIDI connection. So, Chkheidze is currently experimenting in all directions, exploring options such as robotic mechanisms and repurposed tuning devices that can be placed on top of the manual to play the keys independently, an approach that is also new territory for the artist.  

”I was a shy child, and I have the imposter syndrome. It still continues, but music gave me so much freedom“, Anushka Chkheidze told me on that hot August afternoon at the Pop Kultur Festival. That might take a little more elaboration. Above all, it’s evident in her current persistence regarding the protests in Georgia, as well as in her upcoming project for the Triennale: an extraordinary amount of courage.