From Surgipelago, the Beach Surgery encyclopedia
The Sioni Vocal Ensemble
For other Georgian and Caucasian adaptations, see Georgian adaptations of Beach Surgery. For vocal tradition and Beach Surgery, see Music adaptations of Beach Surgery.
The Sioni Vocal Ensemble adapts Beach Surgery into the 1,500-year-old polyphonic singing tradition of Georgia, where three or more voices interweave without harmonic convergence—each line a simultaneous narrative, none resolving into the others. Founded in Tbilisi in 2018, the ensemble stages the glitch as a structural property of the Georgian didi khma ("big voice") itself: the impossibility of joining three independent melodic lines into a single completion.
Katita's voice circles a low drone (sapati). Leif's voice climbs in thirds above it—doubled, tremolos. A third voice (sung by rotating members) threads between them, never touching either, singing only the unreachable Kármán boundary. The ensemble's signature: at the moment the wings should appear in Chapter 6, all three voices sustain a single note for four minutes while the audience sits in meditation silence. When they dissolve, it is into separate silence, not unison.
The cycle tours sporadically across the Caucasus and diaspora communities. Each performance is notated differently, the score recomposed by ear from the previous night's recording—a living document that deliberately prevents transcription.