Review | Street Life — the cold drone of Georgia’s long winter protest

★★★☆☆

Natalie Beridze’s Street Life turns Georgia’s protests into an oppressive soundscape, capturing both the exhaustion and resolve of a movement.

As Georgia’s anti-government protests stretch into their fourth month, leaving the country’s artistic community grappling with how to capture this turbulent moment in history, Natalie Beridze’s latest album Street Life is a haunting soundscape memoir of a generation enduring its coldest and darkest winter.

Constructed almost entirely from samples recorded during the street protests of November–December 2024, Street Life unfolds like a Lynchian take on a protester’s daily reality — an inspiration Beridze openly acknowledges in her dedication to the late director.

The album’s concept recalls certain politically charged musique concrète works, evoking Matthew Herbert’s One Pig — an uncompromising, traumatising piece built entirely from the sounds of a single pig’s life, from birth to slaughter, mixing together squeals, hacksaws, or basslines of dripping blood. Beridze, too, uses raw sounds to build something both deeply personal and unquestionably political.

The last time Georgia’s ruling Georgian Dream party yielded to public pressure was in March 2023, when increasingly violent protests forced it to withdraw the controversial ‘foreign agent’ law. Since then, the country has been descending into authoritarianism at an unprecedented pace with rigged elections, mass intimidation campaigns, and brute pressure on media and civil society. The government has been refining its tactics: pushing with police violence, legislations, and hired thugs when necessary, then retreating just enough to exhaust the protesters standing night after night in Tbilisi’s humid winter air, waiting for change that never comes.

Despite the protests’ bursts of intensity — most notably the dramatic clashes with fireworks straight up hitting the parliament building — Street Life is a deeply ambient work. In the opening track, ‘Minute portion of matter’, the piercing whistles of an angry crowd dissolve into a wall of dreamlike yet ominous noise. Car horns — a defiant symbol of solidarity — stretch into an eerie, droning backdrop, as if slowly smothering the crowd’s ardour rather than fuelling it.

Like the casual protesters forced to ask themselves how far they are willing to go, Georgia’s artists have had to decide the role of politics in their work. Theatres, concert halls, and festivals went on strike in protest, with actors and cultural workers joining the movement. In response, Georgian Dream tightened its grip, introducing a bill that centralises control of theatres in the hands of government-appointed directors. Every act of resistance is met with an immediate countermeasure or readjustment, as if the state keeps fixing bugs in its system of oppression.

That same sense of suffocating inevitability permeates Street Life — a record that is both still and kinetic, capturing the winter wind and the determination to endure.

Around the album’s midpoint, its momentum fades — perhaps an intentional reflection of the exhaustion protesters feel as they show up night after night, only to face the same walls. Yet, the album’s serene closer hints at an unshaken inner peace. Even with the powerful propaganda twisting right into wrong, deep down, beneath the noise, it’s clear which side is the right one.

Album details: Natalie Beridze: Street Life. Released on 18 January 2025. Listen to the album on the artist’s Bandcamp page.

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