Dispatch – August 5: Love Thy Neighbour
It is the law of nature that it must be biblically hot whenever I go to hear Elene perform. Possibly the hottest day of the year. The air must be heavy and thick, and it must be nearly impossible to breathe, to the point of fainting. But then she finally starts to play, and all this initial discomfort becomes part of the story she is going to tell through her music.
That story begins with actual storytelling, her sitting down, reading aloud, with long and dark hair loose. Then, when she stands up and drums and basses and acoustic guitar enter, the experience mimics that of reading a fiction, leaving one always wondering what comes next. There are twists and turns as unexpected as the fresh air that somehow makes its way into the closed spaces, only to disappear the next moment. The only thing predictable is that the concert is in a church, and this even if I’ve never heard of someone playing rock music in a Georgian church before.
Here is Nini and Dispatch newsletter, our regular editorial column with stories about Georgia.
1. Plato’s Cave
The story of how I met Elene Pipia, a Georgian art-rock musician, also came with its twists and accidents. It started when, a long time ago, the sounds of guitar and bass started disrupting my sleep.
It took a while until I traced the source, after many months of trying to accept my fate, then forming a false narrative of some dysfunctional family that would chase me down with that guitar if approached, then approaching the wrong neighbors, and then finally doing proper research to find out there was a girl two floors up, composing music in her room alone and having no idea her seventh floor sounds kept someone on the fifth floor awake at night. At least, no one else had complained. When we finally met, her music was too special, so I had to instantly kill my longtime fantasy of telling my tormentor to “learn how to play guitar.”
For all these years, we have lived in the same apartment building in the farthest reaches of Didi Dighomi, one of Tbilisi’s westernmost suburbs. Over the decades, the area had become a sort of limbo for people heading from the country’s west to try their luck in the capital city. We’d look at the same surreal views from our windows.
There are bare hills covered in dry, green-brownish grass that occasionally catch fire. Flocks of sheep sometimes travel, unclear from where to where, and horses and donkeys and cows appear, too. On top of those hills is a cemetery where the bodies of Georgian war heroes rest. In front, to the left, there used to be an old skeleton of a Soviet-era apartment block, which then suddenly got occupied, somewhat chaotically, by different families. That building often looks like it’s going through a lot. To the right, there is a settlement of barrack-like budget residential houses named after a late Georgian neoliberal reformer. More than a decade has passed since the reformer died, but the settlement continues to sprawl and crawl, with houses added at a pace that we fear will fully cover those hills someday. The settlement then faces a large public transport hub where city buses, blue and green, line up to go to sleep every night.
There are also a couple of pretty trees, and many other peculiar things, with many more emerging. The winds here are very strong, and the snow is sometimes horizontal. Those hills and windy grass have featured in Elene’s clips. I think she wanted to perform to a crowd there someday, too. But before that happens, I went to hear her in perhaps the most windless spot on earth.
2. Elene’s Hot Summers (and Frosty Winters)
That encounter, too, happened by chance. My first-ever trip to Zugdidi, Elene’s hometown in the western Georgian region of Samegrelo where I stopped for a night en route to Svaneti, coincided with her first-ever concert there last summer. The irony was bitter, but the coincidence was too big to ignore.
The venue where she played was never meant to do justice to the musician’s mystery-laden, somewhat ethereal work. It was in the locked courtyard of a large local shopping mall, with the air stagnant and the humidity at near-sauna levels. But when the performance started, it felt like the music was emerging right there and then. The tunes of the acoustic guitar penetrated the thick and wet air in waves, followed by Elene’s ancient and at times distant voice that always sounds as if it has been seeping through things before reaching your ears: through centuries, forests, weathers, waters, or even the floors of the old Soviet apartment block.
The audience was mixed. There were locals, including friends, family, her teachers, and there were “guests from the capital” – a group of intellectuals and publishers who had arrived for some fest there and stayed for the evening concert. And, of course, there was I, her openly noise-sensitive neighbor who suddenly showed up like her most faithful groupie.
I think it wasn’t only I who was dazzled by music that at the same time sounds like the oldest known thing and still unlike anything you’ve heard before. The concert was only the beginning, and more were supposed to follow. But then winter came, and hell again broke loose in Georgia.
3. Broken Piano
Art is often the first casualty when a crisis hits. A sense of shock and helplessness leaves Georgians confused about what to do with music, and the first collective instinct is usually to write it off as inappropriate entertainment and indefinitely silence it. If there’s a need for a protest strike, it is mostly artists who end up stopping their work, perhaps because it is convenient: everyone else has some excuse, either because they might starve themselves, or their protest might cause someone else to starve. If we do starve for music, we probably won’t notice the effects immediately anyway, and when we start noticing, it must take some time before we know it’s due to artistic (and acoustic) starvation.
As for the artists themselves going hungry, that is usually less of an issue. An artist must be poor, the shared wisdom goes, which is why it’s mainly the wealthy and well-connected who can afford artistic pursuits.
It’s either wealthy and well-connected, or those incredibly stubborn and daring.
The risks Elene Pipia has taken aren’t limited to dropping medical studies to pursue music after moving to the capital. Boldness is felt in the unexpected moves between her chords, or sudden changes in rhythm and intensity, or spontaneous transitions between more intense, passionate sections and then back to slow, serene, and mysterious tunes.
None of those risks, however, are deliberate. She says finding harmony in “complete dissonance” was part of her music when she started composing in her early years in her hometown, long before she considered it a career choice. She has a theory that it was inspired by a broken piano on which she taught herself to play without any theoretical knowledge, recalling how she’d skip the most out-of-tune notes while playing as a child.
But it could be just a theory. Her ability to fearlessly and spontaneously navigate different worlds, from magical to painfully real, sober, and back again, is strongly felt during usual conversations, too. And despite all these twists, whether in musical style or the stories her albums tell, everything in her work still feels in its rightful place: the voice, the guitar, the rhythm, the night, the heat, and the church.
4. Rock in Church
Before what was perhaps her most important performance, Elene Pipia played in smaller settings, as months passed and the country slowly learned to live with the resistance and to re-embrace music.
When another summer came and it was time to present her major work, she had to make some changes. She merged and mixed her two albums – Tales of the Forest and Ada Cosma, both telling separate stories drawing from her memories and intimate experiences, some real, some imagined. The mix then produced another back-and-forth wandering, from oceans to forests and back into the oceans, as she described it, and from English lyrics to deeper exploration of Georgian words and lines.
On the evening of July 12, 2025, crowds quickly filled the Baptist-Evangelist Church, a spacious building with a bright facade decorated by neon-lit angel wings. The church is among the rare religious institutions known for embracing the differences in the otherwise conservative country, and has opened its doors to artists before.
The heat followed as people flocked into the room. Soon, it became godlessly hot inside. But God must have been somewhere there, for it was the house of God, and the heavy air was drenched with faith: the faith that, in a world increasingly ruled by fear and caution, something bold was coming to life.