BARS CAN'T STOP MUSIC. HE KEEPS RELEASING FROM HIS JAIL CELL. MEET WITH "MICHAIL TODUA"

With the electronicbeats.com's beautiful interview meet with Michail Todua. DJ and Producer who keeps creating behind the prison bars.

Michail Todua, now 33, has been in prison for five years. A Georgian native who grew up in the capital city of Tbilisi, he spent his life as a DJ and party promoter before being randomly stopped on the street and taken into a local police station for drug testing. Todua, without access to legal or financial help, was incarcerated at the Tbilisi Ministry of Corrections and sentenced to nine years. And while he’s now successfully making and releasing music from within the strict confines of his jail cell, many thousands of people who have been imprisoned under similar circumstances have not been granted the same degree of welfare.

Since the early 2000s—and the implementation of a new and conservative social policy—Todua’s story is one of the thousands that have taken root. Most of those who have fallen victim to the swell in arrests have been forced to give up homes, families and physical possessions in addition to serving unjustifiable jail times. The growth in the number of these incarcerations in recent years, however, has fomented discontent within the city’s younger—and more liberal-leaning—generations and sown the seeds for fledgling movements fighting for advocacy and political reform.

His in-jail music studio lies behind the Tbilisi Ministry of Corrections’ high, barbed wire-trimmed white walls, the cadre of machine gun-carrying guards and nearly two-hour-long security control. The makeshift 10-square-meter workshop is situated on the third story of a building that could pass as an elementary school; its long, empty hallways are filled with windowed doors that look into rows of desks, inmate-crafted pottery projects, and white fluorescent-lit classrooms. Todua’s space contains only a table littered with an old desktop PC, various small synthesizers and a collection of traditional Georgian folk music instruments that he uses to sample, and sometimes to play.

His imprisonment, if anything, has only incited his inclination to produce music seriously. He’s currently working with his wife to build a bigger and better-equipped music studio that will be ready for him to use full-time upon his release. “Right now, I’m only allowed five hours a day here, and only for five days per week,” he says. “I can’t decide when I can be creative. And when I hear new music, it’s tracks that my friends choose for me and put on a USB. So I can’t listen to or look for music properly.” He looks forward to having a space of his own to work on music without the limitations, cameras and security restrictions that the last half-decade of his life have saddled him with. “I have many ideas of what I want to do after I get out,” he says. “But mostly, I want to travel. I want to walk everywhere and I want to play music.”

Check out the original interview at: electronicbeats.com

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