Asea Sool: a guitar from the family workshop and a voice that improvises

Bek Bekson plays a guitar that exists in one copy. A festival announcement from 2013 on the site Muse Cube says his father, a jeweler, designer and artist, designed the instrument, which carries the name Bekson. A microphone sits inside the body, and the guitarist uses it to create unusual samples. He plays with his fingers and with a bow, and he sends the sound through a long row of effects pedals.

The same text calls him a one-man orchestra and a guitar innovator. It places the band's music anywhere from jazz and rock to avant-garde, noise and psychedelia, and it says the brother and sister grew up in Batumi among local traditions, Georgian temperament and a habit of improvising. For the festival, on 24 November 2013 at the Darwin Museum, the band planned to play its songs in reworked acoustic arrangements.

Atina Kornelius sings. The Muse Cube announcement and a Jazzmap listing for a concert on 24 December 2013 both describe her voice as velvet with a very wide range, and both add that the Georgian singer Nino Katamadze has praised it.

The Jazzmap listing names the two leaders as Bek Bekson on guitar and Atina Kornelius on vocals, which matches the pairing the official site describes. A blog post from August 2014 shows how this works in front of children. The author attended a children's concert about a month earlier, at a venue she does not name. According to the author, it was Atina's first time performing for an audience that young. The set began with calm vocal improvisation without words and moved on to livelier jazz and rock and roll pieces. Atina knelt to the children's eye level, played a drum and handed a second microphone to the audience. A girl in a blue dress improvised a song into it. Atina then gave out drumsticks, and the children formed a band that kept the rhythm. The author noted that the band's videos had led her to expect a harder sound; the concert itself, she wrote, was full of energy and positive, with no aggression.

On Bandcamp the siblings are filed more briefly: Asea Sool with Friends carries the tags alternative, indie, pop and soundtrack. The official website files the music under fusion, experimental, jazz, rock, folk and funk. Bekson's own page on that site shows that the craft extends beyond the stage: it presents a guitar made from a shovel, called Baraqa, and a series of custom-built bicycles and motor-assisted bikes. The page does not say how each item was made.