Natalie Beridze If We Could Hear

Prolific Georgian sound artist and composer Natalie Beridze (fka TBA) returns to Room40 with an elegant set
of uncanny vocal treatments, smudging artificial cries into endless, frozen echoes.
When we last spotted her on Room40, Beridze collected up 14 years of unreleased tracks on the brilliant
‘Of Which One Knows’, showing her understanding of ambient chamber music. ‘If We Could Hear’ is a more
recent suite that centers its energy around vocals, but those voices are probably not real. And for an artist
so notorious for her command of song forms, it’s a bold move to take such a different approach. Honestly, it’s
hard to tell that the vocals are synthesized, even; the first time we played ‘If We Could Hear’, we would have
sworn it was Beridze singing. But focus a little closer and the cracks appear. On the extended ‘Who hears it
all’, the sound artist rubberizes a virtual choir, prodding it and pulling it to accentuate the uncanny qualities.
Freezing phrases in time and granulating them so they become gusty pads, Beridze provides an unstable,
anxious ambience, and when she disrupts the relative calm with tape-saturated screams, it’s genuinely
unnerving.
‘Who wakes the dawn’ is a little less bone-rattling, but no less enigmatic. This time an operatic solo voice
leads, sometimes sounding painfully human, before Beridze uses discreet tells to remind us we’re listening
to a synthesizer. Each track uses a similar sonic palette but appears to approach a different musical form:
‘Who whispers to hysteria’ sounds like AI church music, and ‘Who dwells in possibility’ is a Michael Nyman
opera conducted by robots. It’s disquieting material that provides us with plenty of food for thought. Certainly
worth a look if you’ve exhausted Lee Gamble’s ‘Models’ already.