The cassette does not demand attention the way vinyl does. It doesn’t gleam under lamplight, doesn’t declare its grooves as sacred geometry. A cassette sits in the palm, light as a pack of cigarettes, humble, sealed in plastic that ages into translucence. To listen, you press a button that clicks with the finality of a latch. Then comes the interval of anticipation: a brief hiss, a ribbon of static, the ghost of an earlier recording. And then, music.
For Kordz, the Tbilisi-based electronic artist, the cassette becomes more than a carrier. It becomes a metaphor for artistic identity divided into two halves. The A-side carries the music already sanctified by release, polished into tracks that circulate in playlists, clubs, international festivals. The B-side—hidden, unfinished, unmastered—remains inaccessible to all but the most curious. To play a cassette is to acknowledge this architecture of duality: one side made visible, the other recessed into shadow.
Sandro Tavartkiladze’s design sharpens the metaphor. His geometric cover—spare, architectural, precise—frames the cassette as a modern reliquary, a vessel of dual truths. The visual line is almost surgical, as if to suggest a fold in the surface of sound itself. You flip the tape, you cross a threshold.
Kordz’s cassette insists on ritual in a culture allergic to it. In a world of streaming platforms where music arrives as weightless data, the act of turning an object in your hand feels radical. The cassette refuses the convenience of shuffle. It reminds the listener that art has order, sequence, and secret reversals. To turn the tape is to acknowledge that every artist has two lives: the curated one offered to the world, and the other that unspools in the privacy of drafts and errors.
The Public Face: Side A as Cartography of Recognition
Side A is curated like a visiting card, a sonic biography compressed into ribboned magnetism. These are the “hits” — the tracks that have already entered circulation, the collaborations that anchor Kordz within a larger constellation of Georgian and international electronic music. To play Side A is to hear the artist in his public voice, articulate and already mediated through audience response.
The atmosphere is one of declaration. Beats arrive clean, rhythms scaffolded with architectural precision, the sound design tailored for rooms where music becomes a collective experience — clubs, festivals, radio broadcasts. Each track feels weighted with recognition, a body of work that has survived the Darwinism of taste.
Kordz positions Side A as the surface narrative: the works that listeners already know, the collaborations that signal his cosmopolitan reach. In these tracks, the Georgian underground folds into a wider electronic discourse, linking Tbilisi’s scene to Berlin, London, or Amsterdam. The cassette’s first half, therefore, functions as a cartography of recognition. It maps a trajectory from the intimate studios to the international stage, charting Kordz’s growth through the pieces that became calling cards.
Side A insists on repetition. To re-hear a hit is to test its durability. Does the track still carry its pulse after repeated exposure, or has it dulled into familiarity? In Kordz’s case, the hits survive the stress test. Their density, their textural layering, their carefully measured architecture reveal themselves anew when pressed onto tape. The analog format adds a soft granularity, as if reminding the listener that sound, like memory, always arrives slightly eroded.
Side A is therefore less about surprise than about affirmation. It declares: this is the artist you know, the Kordz already inscribed in collective listening. But it also prepares the ear for reversal. The listener, aware that another side exists, begins to anticipate the shadow archive waiting on the flip.
The Secret Life: Side B as Shadow Archive
If Side A is the public stage, Side B is the after-hours room. It holds the unreleased tracks — B-sides that never made it to digital platforms, sketches polished into obscurity, or perhaps pieces too fragile to survive the spotlight. On tape, they bloom.
The atmosphere of Side B is different from the declarative confidence of the “hits.” It is hushed, exploratory, and private, as though the artist had unlocked a diary rather than a discography. Here the listener enters a workshop where ideas unfold in their raw state, where harmonies stretch into unexpected dissonances and beats falter into silence only to reassemble into a new rhythm.
The cultural significance of Side B lies in its refusal to conform. For an artist like Kordz, whose music already balances between Georgian specificity and international abstraction, these unreleased tracks reveal the sediment beneath the polished surface. They suggest experiments with texture, improvisations with form, soundscapes that flirt with ambient drift or industrial fracture. One track may hang on a single synthesizer tone stretched until it shimmers like stained glass; another may lean on field recordings that carry the muffled sound of a street in Tbilisi at dusk.
Listening to Side B is to overhear the artist thinking. It is an archive of hesitations, of gestures too delicate or unruly to be turned into a “hit.” The tape medium, with its grain and hiss, accentuates this intimacy. Where Side A is linear and declarative, Side B is elliptical and unresolved.
Culturally, this side matters because it resists commodification. In a landscape where streaming platforms flatten listening into algorithms, Side B reasserts the value of scarcity. These tracks exist only here, in this cassette, in a format that demands rewinding, flipping, re-listening. It is a gift economy disguised as a commercial product. For collectors and listeners, Side B becomes a form of trust: the artist is sharing what would otherwise remain unshared.
In a broader sense, Side B articulates the dual life of contemporary Georgian music. Publicly, artists like Kordz build international recognition with clean, exportable works. Privately, they generate experiments that preserve local textures, idiosyncrasies, and eccentricities — pieces that might resist global legibility but remain crucial to the ecology of the scene.
Side B is therefore less an appendix than a revelation. It shows the shadows behind the spotlight, the “other Kordz” who refuses closure. To listen is to hear the artist in process, and to acknowledge that music’s true power often resides in what is withheld.
The Flip of a Cassette: Between Spectacle and Sketch
The cassette form itself deepens this duality. To flip a tape is to enact a ritual of reversal, to leave one room for another. It emphasizes that art has two faces: the sanctioned, glossy surface and the hidden drafts, both necessary, both true. Kordz and designer Sandro Tavartkiladze—whose visual work captures this doubleness with stark precision—have built an object that reminds us what it means to inhabit music across different registers of intimacy.
In the end, the cassette is not merely a document of tracks but a portrait of an artist divided between two imperatives: to be heard, and to hear himself. Its power lies less in the hits than in the quiet, unreleased materials where risk and invention take root. To sit with both sides in sequence is to witness a rare honesty: the spectacle and the sketch, the public and the private, held together by the magnetic tape that spins, endlessly, between them.
By Ivan Nechaev
