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Koka NIKOLADZE (born in 1989, in Tbilisi-Georgia) is a Georgian-born artist living in Norway. He studied classical violin at Tbilisi State Conservatoire, composition with Marco Stroppa at the Academy of Performing Arts Stuttgart, and completed a master's in music technology at the Norwegian Academy of Music.
His music is performed at major festivals, including Donaueschinger Musiktage, Vancouver New Music Festival, PODIUM, DuÌsseldorf Festival, ULTIMA, and others. He has conducted and performed his works at venues ranging from Elbphilharmonie Hamburg to Funkhaus Berlin. In 2021, he was honoured to perform as the Norwegian royal family opened the new Munch Museum in Oslo.
Koka's experimental audiovisual works such as Singularity for Oslo Philharmonic and People for Nordic Voices explore the edge of synesthetic experience. These video works are composed as musical works, featuring a unique compositional technique that has been broadly acclaimed by online audiences.
Koka designs and builds electromechanical art objects. His Beat Machines, public since 2016, gained wide attention, and were featured by Discovery Channel, ARTE, Deutsche Welle, MTV, VICE, and WIRED. His work spans a broad spectrum—from Ableton LOOP to Beethovenfest Bonn, from intricate ensemble scores to large-scale YouTube video pieces. His electromechanical instruments are held in prestigious art collections in Europe.
Currently, Koka lives and works in Oslo. He serves as Associate Professor and Head of Studies in Live Electronics at the Norwegian Academy of Music teaching composition, music technology and the art of videography.
(born 30 September 1989, in Tbilisi)
People, a commission from Nordic Voices, became my attempt to find out what I had to say - and whether I had anything left to say at all, at a moment when images and sounds have never been cheaper to produce, or harder to trust.
I spent a week recording dozens of hours of material with one camera and one microphone. I fixed a chair to the floor and spent the rest of the week on my knees behind each singer, supporting their back with an outstretched hand so their face would hold its position in the frame while they sang. I sketched hundreds of fragments on post-it notes, sang to the singers, talked with them - collecting, voice by voice, material I had dreamt up.
Then I edited the piece by hand, frame by frame, clip by clip. The material is monophonic - one face, one voice at a time - and any sense of polyphony comes from the speed at which the clips alternate. There are no special effects. Bound by sixty frames per second, I worked with the rhythmic structures that grid format made available and looked for the complexity inside them.
People is not a concert work that was filmed. It is a piece that can only exist as video, where the editing carries the counterpoint. It was premiered at the opening of NoTAM, the Norwegian Centre for Technology in Music and the Arts, and then published on YouTube - not as documentation, but as a work presented on a platform where it naturally belongs.
I intended People as music. The rest has been a surprise.
Koka Nikoladze