Working with her is like working with the foundation of that culture that sort of influenced us all.
Mtvareo: In a New Light Hello, my name is kordz.
I am a producer and composer from Tbilisi, Georgia.
This is my home studio in Tbilisi.
This is where I work and where I live.
I make lots of different music.
I produce electronic music myself, release my own music, I write for orchestras, work with ensembles in the contemporary music field.
As a human, you don't decide with what musical heritage you grow up.
You are just born in an environment, and you grow up with certain kinds of music that are in that environment, and you don't have any choice over it.
My first experience of, you know, deciding what I want to listen to myself was always very much like everything from rock n roll to James Brown, Prince, that kind of sound.
So when I rediscovered Georgian music for myself, I started listening to the songs that I probably listened to when I was a child, and I started sort of re-discovering it.
And one of the tracks that really stuck out to me, and I don't really know why, was the short segment from Mtvareo, which is a song for the movie, Veris Ubnis Melodiebi.
So since like 2016, I have different sketches of that song lying around on my hard drive.
I actually went through them and it's like, I always wanted to do something with it.
Sometimes I wanted to arrange it for like, a more classical cello piece.
Then I wanted to do like a dance version of it.
And so I have all these sketches lying around.
The person who most represents this kind of Georgian music, what I talked about - this super romantic, sentimental style is Nani Bregvadze, because she would work with all of these composers.
All the composers would write these songs for her.
So she was the first person who sang them.
So all of that sort of history and that cultural like, thing lives through her in a way.
And so one day her grandson, Gogiko, asked me if I wanted to work with Nani on this new piece.
And they had the song text written and they had the music, but they didn't have an arrangement for it.
So they wanted me to do the arrangement for Nani, and I tried to do different arrangements for it, and I sat together with Nani, we had like several sessions and, you know, I always thought, like, if I work with Nani, it has to be something really calm, like it has to be something with like spherical with pads, like romantic -- what she does.
We had like three sessions together, always at her apartment.
And like I put all my equipment there with like the microphone and my interface and the speaker and we recorded and she was just really not happy with it.
For her, it was like, if we do this romantic music, it has to be with piano.
And I think this romantic piano accompaniment that's part of like this, this culture, it's a very specific accompaniment.
It's very free, the tempo is very free.
It's very like, you get faster, slower, louder, quieter.
And she's very used to it because she's doing it for like 70 years.
So that's like her.
And I can't do that because I have no...
I mean, I really can't, and she clearly doesn't want my synthesizer pads.
And so we were kind of stuck.
And then I thought, man, I will just show her my Mtvareo sketches that I have lying around, just like sort of as a last stand.
And then I showed her this first Mtvareo sketch and it had this kind of, like, you know...slow.
It had a beat and it's like [makes beat].
And with the harmonies of Mtvareo and she and she listened to it and she was like, yeah, that's amazing.
We should we should do that.
And really, the same afternoon we recorded like the first verse.
And from then on, the track kind of came together by itself.
I was supposed to play at the festival, Tbilisi Open Air and my manager Koka had the idea to...
maybe we could ask Nani to perform the piece with me.
Because I would never have dared to ask her to perform with me at the Open Air.
But turns out that she really wanted to perform at the Open Air, because I think part of the reason she liked doing this project and this music, is because she always felt like she want to do something for the kids.
She's like, yeah, I want to do this for the kids, for the young people.
And so I think with the Open Air, it was also like for the kids.
There was this moment where, like her car arrived in front of the Open Air stage and I started playing already and everything.
And supposedly Nani asked someone, you know, when does kordz start?
And then someone said kordz started already.
And she was like, no, no, that's a different guy.
He's just a crazy guy jumping on the stage there.
It's like, no, that's kordz.
And he was like supposedly she was really confused that that was me, because until then we only like, met in her living room and we were just, like, writing music together.
And all of a sudden I was just like, on stage jumping around.
Working with other people's material, we often as producers, run into, questions like, what is legal?
Can we do that?
Who do we have to ask?
Is it allowed?
And I think it's good to have platforms like CLIP, to look up and sort of see what is allowed.
And for me personally is, I only work with music that I have a deep connection to from my childhood or something that I just discovered now and reminds me of something that I knew from my childhood.
And so if I'm convinced that this music that I'm working with is something that really shaped my music, that I'm doing anyway, then I can sort of, I know that the outcome is not going to be something that's inauthentic or like, stupid.
I never imagined that I would do this with the actual person who recorded it originally.
