Rave, resist, repeat: Georgia’s renowned techno scene fights for survival in pro-EU protests

As the sun set over Tbilisi’s Marjanishvili Square on 13 December, the intersection filled with leather-clad DJs, promoters, and longtime techno fans. Yet these representatives of Georgia’s renowned electronic music scene had not gathered to party. They were there to protest.

Carrying signs reading ‘We resist repressions!’ and ‘From the clubs to the streets fight for equality’, the marchers blocked the road next to the river Mtkvari as they followed a pick-up truck blasting tracks by some of Georgia’s most prominent DJs. They  were headed for the Georgian Parliament, which has become a focal point for daily mass protests since the ruling Georgian Dream party halted the country’s EU accession process on 28 November.

Joining individual demonstrations by numerous trade, cultural, and academic groups, Tbilisi’s techno clubs — regarded as some of the world’s best — have declared an indefinite strike. The protesters are demanding new elections, after Georgian Dream — led by billionaire oligarch Bidzina Ivanishvili — won a majority in the October parliamentary elections amid reports of widespread fraud.

In an open letter on 29 November, six of the city’s most prominent venues urged ravers to spend their nights on the streets instead of the dance floor, calling for ‘demonstrations of disobedience’ against ‘Russian authoritarianism’.

‘I think in Georgia, the leaders of the protest are ravers’, Gogla Kovziridze, an organiser of queer techno events and founder of Ravegram, an Instagram-based online publication dedicated to Tbilisi’s techno scene, tells OC Media.

Kovziridze notes that during the recent wave of protests, Ravegram has grown from a niche outlet for electronic music lovers into a hub for political commentary, details about demonstrations, and attempts to counter government ‘propaganda’.

David Lezheva, a restaurant owner and co-founder of the Cultural and Creative Industries Union of Georgia, an organisation advocating for the interests of entertainment venues, says ravers were on the front lines of the protest in its critical first few nights, when riot police violently dispersed crowds using tear gas and rubber bullets.

‘Well fuck, these are only dancers!’, he remembers telling a friend at 05:00 following the second night of protests. ‘Like 90% of the crowd were club goers’.

Since the protests began, police have arrested more than 460 protesters, with over half reporting mistreatment or torture while in detention and at least 80 being hospitalised, according to a recent report from Human Rights Watch.

Ravers have stayed in the streets, but the strike has taken a significant financial toll on Tbilisi’s techno scene.

One club — Mtkvarze — has chosen to permanently reopen, while others, have turned to crowdfunding campaigns to stay afloat.

‘The clubs have always been struggling, but especially after the strikes, it became even harder’, Giorgi Kikonishvili, a queer activist who helped organise the 13 December march and who co-founded Horoom Nights, a weekly queer-friendly party at techno club Bassiani, tells OC Media.

‘We just have to navigate the situation in a way that we keep the protest, but also we keep the spaces’, he adds.

‘Everything was anti-establishment’

Founded a decade ago in an empty cement swimming pool beneath Tbilisi’s Dinamo Stadium, Bassiani has gained a reputation as one of the world’s foremost techno venues, hosting international DJs including Ben Klock, Nina Kraviz, and Hétor Oaks.

From the beginning, Kikonishvili said the club involved itself in political activism, including struggles for environmental justice, queer rights, and the ‘White Noise Movement’, aimed at loosening Georgia’s punitive drug policies.

‘Every movement which was either led by Bassiani or which was born at Bassiani, everything was anti-establishment and [against] the current political status quo’, Kikonishvili says. ‘It was also becoming a headache for the existing power structures’.

In 2018, police armed with assault rifles raided Bassiani and Cafe Gallery — Tbilisi’s oldest techno club — in what they claimed was a crackdown on the sale of illegal drugs. Clubgoers marched straight from the venues to the Georgian parliament, holding a dayslong protest that transformed into an outdoor rave.

‘It was obvious that the target was not just the club, but all of the movements, our freedom generally’, Kikonishvili tells OC Media. ‘It was like dance or die’.

The demonstrations, which culminated in an official apology from then-Prime Minister Giorgi Gakharia, marked a significant victory for Tbilisi’s techno subculture. The city’s clubs now number in the double digits and have become a pillar of its thriving alternative scene, with well-known names including KHIDI, Tes, and Left Bank.

The demonstrations also made techno into the ‘sound of protest’ in Georgia, according to Kovziridze, who sees the cacophony of chants, whistles, and rocks banging against metal, sounds which define the protests, as a form of music in itself.

‘[Techno] calls you to act, to do something, and to move and to resist’, Kovziridze says.

In the half-decade since the Bassiani raid, Georgian Dream has embraced more socially conservative stances and adopted policies that have placed the clubs under increased strain.

Last spring, the ruling party again provoked fierce street demonstrations when it passed Russian-style laws requiring any organisation receiving more than 20% of its funding from abroad to register as a ‘foreign agent’ and restricting LGBTQ+ rights of assembly and representation in media. The club scene’s crisis has continued to escalate after the government’s pivot away from the EU, and many members now view the stakes as existential.

‘I don’t see a scenario where the government stays and clubbing goes back to normal’, Bassiani resident DJ Mamuka Tskhadaia, known by his stage name Hamatsuki, tells OC Media, adding that he thinks the government feels that ‘there is nothing they cannot do’ to restrict the clubbing scene.

Working with a group of artists, Tskhadaia helped turn an underground creative space into a shelter to protect protesters facing down tear gas and water cannons. Yet he worries that even this action could put him at risk, as the government has increasingly targeted prominent activists, journalists, and opposition politicians in its crackdown on protests.

‘We’re doing everything we can legally,’ Tskhadaia says. ‘But at this point, we feel that they can still come to your house and take you to court, which is controlled by them fully’.

‘A liberational process’

As Tbilisi’s techno scene has come under fire, the city’s queer community has felt the threat most acutely. In a country where homophobic views are commonplace and encouraged by major cultural institutions like the Georgian Orthodox Church, many queer Georgians see the clubs as a critical refuge.

Valley Dolly, a resident DJ at Bassiani and member of the queer electronic music collective Hydrash who attended the rally at Marjanishvili Square, spends every weekend in the clubs, which feel like ‘home’.

‘Every time I’m going outside in the streets, there’s always a chance of me getting hate-crimed by random men’, they tell OC Media. ‘That's the sad reality, but I think that’s what makes us strong, and that’s what makes our queer scene very unique’.

In September, Kesaria Abramdize, a well-known Georgian transgender model, was murdered in her apartment the day after the government passed its anti-queer legislation.

Beka Gardava, a longtime club goer who also attended the rally, left Georgia a decade ago and sought asylum in the Netherlands due to homophobia, spending over two years living in a refugee camp. Yet, he says the techno scene has played a significant role in changing younger Georgians’ attitudes toward the queer community.

‘There’s a totally new generation’, Gardava tells OC Media. ‘When you see this all from a young age, I think it helps you to become more open about everything’.

Nearly half of Georgians now consider the protection of LGBTQ rights to be an important social priority, according to a 2021 study by the Council of Europe’s Caucasus Research Resource Centre, up from 33% in 2018.

Kikonishvili says the Horoom parties have played a central role in that process. Beyond serving as a safe space for queer ravers, the events also provided a creative outlet for figures who would go on to lead Tbilisi’s queer scene, including Nia Gvatua, a DJ and owner of the gay bar Success, and Hitori Ni, creative director of Bassiani’s queer parties.

Yet, he said one of Horoom’s most profound impacts was the space it created for building understanding between queer and straight clubgoers.

‘It’s paradoxical, maybe, but the queer parties became a liberational process even for straight people,’ Kikonishvili tells OC Media. ‘When I was observing the dance floor […] straight couples were behaving more freely in the queer parties than at the regular parties’.

An uncertain future

Despite the strides made by Georgia’s queer community in recent years, Kikonishvili still recalls feeling nervous as the 13 December march crossed the Baratashvili Bridge for its final approach to parliament.

‘I was thinking to myself that maybe it will bring some kind of conflict’, Kikonishvili remembers, noting the large number of conservative Georgians from rural communities who have joined the protests.

Yet he was overjoyed to find the crowd cheering for his ‘very queer, very leftist, and even anarchistic’ demonstration.

‘I was like, “Wow, Giorgi, calm down. This is a different society”’, Kikonishvili says.

In recent weeks, the electronic music community has sought to leverage its central role in the protest to build more durable organising networks. Last week, a new group called ‘Speak Up’ held its first meeting at TES club, seeking to bring together representatives of the club scene to discuss the role they can play in the protests and broader struggles for queer rights and artistic freedom.

These days, the flyers posted on Ravegram are far more likely to announce a protest than a DJ set — a shift that Kovziridze plans to keep on as they expand the publication from an Instagram account into a website and eventual print magazine in the future.

‘I don’t want to stop the political side of Ravegram’, Kovziridze says. ‘For me, dancing and music and sport — everything is political’.

Yet as the protests continue, Tbilisi’s techno venues are faced with the weighty task of balancing their role in the demonstrations with their own financial situation and responsibilities to their community.

‘They have to survive, and they have to make money’, Kovziridze tells OC Media. ‘They have to bring [salaries] to the people who are working there, because they have no other jobs’.

The international electronic music community is taking notice. BASEMENT, one of New York City’s most celebrated techno clubs, started a fundraiser for Bassiani earlier this month, while organisers in Sweden and Germany are collecting donations for KHIDI and Left Bank.

The strike will go on, but with the New Years holiday approaching, Kovziridze hopes the clubs make an exception.

‘It’s a night to celebrate’, Kovziridze says. ‘We will go to parliament, it will be a very big march […] and after, I think some people who are ravers have to go to the clubs’.