RIHA’s ‘V’ Connects Family History and Svan Mythology

The music of Rati Oniani, who records as RIHA, has always pulled from the mountainous Svaneti region of north-western Georgia. On his new album V, that pull becomes a full immersion. Conceived as the soundtrack to a forthcoming documentary about his grandfather—the sculptor, painter and illustrator Vakhtang Oniani—the record expands the raw energy of earlier work into a more cinematic and narrative-driven shape.

Svan folklore, family history and personal memory guide the album, but the music refuses to settle into straightforward storytelling. What emerges instead is a sequence of dense scenes. Liturgical grandeur, progressive rock digressions, jazz-inflected passages and the metallic crash of church organ coexist without forced fusion. The track “Amav Gushgvei (Baroque Metal)” collides organ and metal aesthetics with a matter-of-factness that feels archival rather than theatrical.

The organ, in fact, is one of the album’s defining voices. Its reverberant, ceremonial weight echoes Jon Lord’s Hammond experiments as much as the acoustics of stone churches, lending the music an archaic quality even as it pushes into unfamiliar corridors. Elsewhere, “Dandelion” drifts into warm, dreamlike ambience drawn from memories of the artist’s grandfather, revealing a gentler register.

What holds V together is its refusal to choose between opposites. The personal and the mythical, the sacred and the playful, progressive rock and Georgian folk traditions all share the same musical space. At moments the album threatens to lose itself in abundance—the disorienting “Moon” comes to mind—but never quite becomes directionless. Instead, it translates cultural memory into something contemporary, a living archive rather than a fixed monument.