On Happiness Is Found In The Soul’s Immortality, Tbilisi’s Gvantsa Narim captures grief within sonic resonance. These eight pieces are emotionally potent and absorbing, written and recorded using her late father’s piano in what feels like music pulled from elsewhere, Narim becoming a conduit to another plane. Quiet moments sharpen the melodic edges, giving Happiness Is Found… a delicate spirit, vulnerable and impossible to resist. There’s an otherworldly quality to how she discusses sound itself, talking about vibration as if it were a living presence, about silence as something that breathes. She is someone who has learned to not just listen to music, but to connect with the invisible currents that move beneath it.
Happiness Is Found In The Soul’s Immortality is out now on Cruel Nature.
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What are your earliest memories of music and sound? I’m curious about those foundational moments that first opened your ears.
My earliest memory is not so much a sound as it is a vibration. I remember lying in the dark as a child and hearing silence that was never truly silent — a hum, a pulse, as if the world itself were breathing. Later, I realized it was both the sound of my father’s piano resonating in the house and the sound of my own blood moving through me. That union of inner and outer sound was my first music.
Growing up in Tbilisi, how did the city’s soundscape influence your development as an artist? What did you hear there that you carry with you now?
Tbilisi has a soul of contradictions: the quiet devotion of church bells against the chaos of markets, the river flowing like a hidden basso continuo beneath the city. I carry with me the dissonance between sacred stillness and urban disorder. That tension taught me that beauty often hides inside imperfection, and that the soul’s song is strongest when sung against noise.
Georgia has such a rich tradition of polyphonic singing and folk music. How does that cultural heritage weave into your contemporary sound practice?
Polyphony is not only harmony, it is a metaphysics: many voices becoming one truth without losing themselves. In my work, I try to echo that principle — layering tones so that they are both distinct and dissolved, human yet otherworldly. Georgian folk music is in my blood, but I do not repeat it — I let it dissolve into ambient textures, where its spirit still breathes.
The title, Happiness Is Found In The Soul’s Immortality, feels both deeply personal and universally resonant. How did you arrive at those specific words?
The phrase came to me during prayer-like reflection after my father’s passing. It was less an invention than a revelation. Grief stripped away every temporary happiness I had known, leaving me with the realization that true joy cannot be owned in this world — it exists only in the soul’s eternity. The title is a statement of faith disguised as music.
What was the most challenging part of making this record? What surprised you?
The challenge was surrender. Every time I tried to control the music, it resisted. Only when I allowed grief and memory to guide my hand did the compositions emerge. The surprise was how gentle the process became — pain transfigured into something luminous, like light breaking through water.
What was it like working with your father’s piano? Was there a moment when you knew it needed to become central to this album?
The piano carries his fingerprints, not just on its keys but within its resonance. The first time I touched it after his death, I felt as though he were still present — speaking not in words, but in harmonics. That moment made it clear: this piano was not an instrument, it was a relic, a medium. It could not be absent from the album because it was the album’s soul.
You’ve described this as a tribute to your late father and your most intimate work to date. Can you tell me about that relationship and how it shaped these compositions?
My father gave me two gifts: silence and sound. He taught me reverence for stillness, but also how to awaken it through a note. His passing opened a wound, but also a portal — my compositions became dialogues with him, echoes across the veil. In truth, this record is not mine alone; it is co-written with absence.
How did grief change your relationship to making music? Did you find yourself needing different sounds, different approaches?
Grief stripped music of all ornament. I no longer sought to impress or to decorate. I searched only for purity — tones that could carry weight without collapsing. In grief, I learned that sound can be a prayer, a ritual, an invocation. The music became less about performance and more about presence.
The album creates these profound meditative spaces. Were you consciously crafting a specific kind of listening experience?
Yes and no. I wanted to shape spaces where the listener could dissolve, but I did not dictate what they must feel. Each piece is like a threshold: the listener decides whether to enter lightly, to linger, or to pass through into their own inner silence. The meditative quality is intentional, but the destination is always personal.
How has creating this album changed your relationship to your own artistic practice?
It made me humble. I realized I am not the origin of the music but its vessel. Sound moves through me the way breath moves through the body — I only shape its exhalation. Now, I approach every composition with more reverence, less ego.
What’s something about your creative process that might surprise people?
That much of it is waiting. I often sit in stillness for hours, listening before I play. Sometimes I record the silence of a room, then layer sound upon it as if sculpting stone. People may think the music begins when I strike a note, but in truth it begins long before, in the invisible.
And lastly, as always, to close… What are some of your favorite sounds in the world?
The sound of distant bells at dusk. The quiet cracking of wood in fire. A single human breath in the silence of a chapel. Rain against glass. The faint resonance after a piano key is released. And perhaps most of all: the sound of stillness itself, that eternal music beneath all music.
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