Second from bottom: Zviad Gelbakhiani. Bottom: Tato Getia

Paco Sabelashvili

Bassiani, the biggest techno club in Tbilisi, is a maze of poured concrete in the basement of Dinamo Arena, Georgia's national football stadium. On Saturday mornings, once the sun is up, you can watch smoke drift across the pitch, belched upwards from the party downstairs, where as many as 1,200 people shuffle around an empty swimming pool. The DJ booth is in the deep end, facing a landing strip of a dance floor that ends at a sitting area of bare cement (formerly the kids' pool). From there you can take in the whole scene: countless silhouettes on elevated catwalks and a sloping dance floor, encased in a room whose vastness becomes clear only in brief flashes of colored light.Zenker Brothers played the last time I was there, and I don't think I've ever seen DJs so excited to get started. At dinner they'd been cool and collected—jet-set artists with anecdotes from around the world. But when they appeared in the booth that night, they gawked at the room like little kids, unable to hide their excitement. "It's got that" Marco said, referring to the inimitable aroma of a true techno party. They started around 4 AM, following a live set from their label-mate Andrea, and went until almost noon, smoothly guiding the night from a heaving rave to a cozy afterhour. From about 10 AM on, only 50 or so people remained, frolicking in a milky bath of smoke and yellow light. The Zenkers dug into their breakbeats, and then moved on to tender cuts like Omar-S's "The Further You Look - The Less You Will See." Even the club's staff couldn't resist getting involved. By the time I went to buy a tote bag at the coatcheck, the girls who worked there had long since abandoned their post for the dance floor.Over the last few years, Tbilisi, a city of steep hills and curvy streets at the border of Europe and Asia, has become a new hotbed for underground dance music. Bassiani has played a leading role in this, but it's only one of several clubs that would be exceptional in any city—there's also Mitkvarze, Vitamin Cubes, Café Gallery and its sister venue, Didi Gallery, plus one that's just opened called Khidi. As time goes on, more and more house and techno DJs list the Georgian capital as one of their favorite places to play.What makes it so good? First there are the basics: smartly booked clubs with excellent soundsystems, passionate crowds and parties that go well past dawn. But there's also a more complex reality that is perhaps the scene's most important ingredient. History has not been kind to Tbilisi, "a city which has burned down 40 times in its history," according to, and for which the last 25 years have been particularly dramatic. Since the collapse of the Soviet Union, Georgia's been the scene of two wars and years of abject poverty. And yet, over time it nurtured a devoted underground of DJs and promoters that, in the last few years, has flourished into something extraordinary, even more so because it represents such an exhilarating break from the past. 20 years ago Tbilisi barely had electricity; today, it has one of the best scenes for electronic music in the world.Just like in Berlin in the early '90s or the UK in the second summer of love, raves in Tbilisi have a social and political element that makes them something more than just a way of having fun. They exist as proof of a new era in Georgia and represent the liberal, Western values seeping into its cultural fabric. In a place where anti-homophobia rallies end in violence and vegan cafés are attacked by sausage-wielding nationalists , techno clubs are symbols of progressiveness and tolerance, a refusal of their country's narrow-mindedness. As the social activist Paata Sabelashvili put it to me: "In Georgia, raving is a political act."The next time I went to Bassiani, the scene was very different. The place was full from front to back, but everyone was sitting—some in fold-out chairs on the dance floor, others with their legs dangling from the catwalk and the kiddie pool. Cameramen stalked the edges of the room. A solid chunk of Tbilisi's DJs, promoters and club owners stood around chatting and smoking. Aphex Twin's "Xtal" played quietly over the soundsystem. Political activists sat in a row onstage, awaiting their turns to make remarks.This was a gathering held by White Noise , an activist group devoted to changing Georgia's drug laws. Animated videos went over statistics all too familiar to this crowd: 112 people forced to take drug tests every day, often based on nothing more than "reasonable doubt"; those who test positive are given the harshest sentence possible, often crippling fines and jail time. The panelists shared their own insights and experiences. One of them was Beqa, a musician who became the figurehead of White Noise when he successfully beat a marijuana charge that would have put him away for seven years. Another was Sabelashvili, a gay activist and outspoken recreational drug user who's dedicated his career to making Georgia more tolerant—"My whole life I've been trying to legalize myself," he said.Standing off to the side were the two 25-year-olds who run Bassiani, Tato Getia and Zviad Gelbakhiani. Neither of them was a political person before they started throwing parties, but now they say they spend more time on social activism than they do on their club. Getia, for his part, has spent quite a bit of time on TV talking about the country's drug laws, which he and others consider a human rights issue."I never would have seen myself being that kind of person," he told me. "It's because we've seen so many cases with our own eyes, so many injustices which we did not see before. For instance, a guy who was caught with 0.00009 milligrams of some substance. Since there are no minimum dosages in Georgia, it's the same as a big amount, so he faces five to eight years of prison. In the last couple of months, we have had at least two cases when the police have basically killed innocent drug users."Getia told me this at the traditional Georgian restaurant where Bassiani take their guest artists. An hour later, the Ilian Tape guys would be here, and this long table would be covered with classics of Georgia's singular cuisine—breads, cheeses and spreads with names likeand. Sitting across from me, the young promoters were backdropped by the mountains across the river, which were barely visible in the purple dusk. Gelbakhiani gazed calmly at his laptop. Getia was less at ease—he smoked cigarette after cigarette and winced every time his phone buzzed, as distressed by pre-party anxiety as he was by our topics of conversation."Say it was given to you as a question in a survey or something," Gelbakhiani said. "You're given some basic facts on a city: half the people are below the average salary, making 200 euro per month or less, and there is repressive police regime with a zero-tolerance drug policy, people going to prison all the time. Would you think there are some good techno parties going on?""The main danger for us is the political situation," Getia said. "If this zero-drug-tolerance policy will not change at some point, say in five years, I can't see any future, that's for sure." I noticed he was wearing a White Noise T-shirt, and he said he had to lead a televised press conference at 11 AM the next morning about the organization. The plan was to take a nap that night in Bassiani's office and sneak off while the party was still going.Getia's probably right to see Georgia's drug laws as an existential threat, but for the time being, the scene is rolling with them extraordinarily well. Drugs have been almost completely eradicated from Tbilisi's nightclubs, but the people there don't seem to need them. They dance like crazy and stay past dawn with nothing more than, at most, a little bit of hash (typically smoked in a cut-up water bottle, as joints are considered too wasteful). They don't drink much booze, either, relatively speaking. Tea Kikvadze, who runs the club Vitamin Cubs, estimates the average nightly spend per person is about 15 lari, enough for two or three beers.That this should fuel eight or more hours of dancing speaks to the enthusiasm of Tbilisi's crowds, something Western DJs always notice. "They were the most enthusiastic, knowledgeable and receptive audience I've ever experienced," Bryan Kasenic, founder of The Bunker New York, wrote on Facebook after his gig at Bassiani. "The young Tbilisi scene is really in an incredible place right now. They were as responsive to the deep and weird psychedelic stuff as they were to the bangers that Marco [Shuttle], Wata Igarashi and I threw at them."Bassiani is by no means the only place where you notice this kind of thing. Café Gallery, another leader in Tbilisi's scene, is the yin to Bassiani's yang, booking house DJs in an intimate space that's a café throughout the rest of the week. When I was there, Manamana, the DJ duo of map.ache and Sevensol, played all night. Long before the dance floor reached a critical mass—before all the food had even been cleared away from the tables—I noticed one guy who was entranced, eyes closed, lips pursed, bobbing his head and moving a raised hand to the beat, almost as if he were silently rapping. Mariam Murusidze, who books the club, told me he's there every weekend, dancing from the first track to the last, always alone, never having anything beyond the occasional beer. Later that night, in broken German (a common second language in Tbilisi), he told me this weekly routine is a "therapy" for him.Indeed, there was something therapeutic about the party: a small and lively crowd under a single red light, bouncing around a packed dance floor that seemed to flex to Manamana's undulating rhythms. The night had a bittersweet final stretch, just as it had at Bassiani. As needles of sunlight pierced the darkness, the DJs moved from heartstring-pullers like Roy Davis Jr.'s "Gabriel" to more audacious pop fare. Eventually someone swung open the thick wooden blinds, drenching the room in sunlight in time with the opening chords of Black's "Wonderful Life." A few people in front sung along to the chorus——while Café Gallery's most loyal dancer sat in the corner, watching the scene with an exhausted smile.When I met Murusidze for coffee at Café Gallery earlier that week, a more tranquil scene prevailed. 20- and 30-somethings eased their way through the morning, writing in notebooks, reading paperbacks and smoking out the room's tall windows. Outside, traffic swooshed down Rustaveli Avenue, an elegant boulevard central to Tbilisi's geography and history. Beyond it, the Kura River churned. I asked Murusidze if she found it surprising that, given the upheaval of the last 25 years, her city should now find itself with such a strong club scene. She smiled, obviously fond of this topic. "It's a logical consequence," she said. "It was meant to happen."