- Damien Dubrovnik shows are gnarly. In between black metal screams, Loke Rahbek might swallow a contact mic while retching and gagging, or dunk his head into a bucket of water. His partner Christian Stadsgaard mans the gear, working up seismic storms of searing noise and power electronics that smash against you like concrete waves, with the occasional ambient reprieve. These performances are intense and physical, usually set up away from a stage, at floor-level, with the audience crowding round. Damien Dubrovnik are a social experiment as much as a sonic one: the duo, like Pharmakon, want you to enter their world, a space that invites the audience to "gain from it whatever they want," to feel, experience and connect.
Their records can be as excoriating as their shows, but not always. Their last album, Vegas Fountain, released on Helm's label Alter, married moments of moody drones and more romantic composing with the torturous electronics for which they're better known. Around a similar time, they released The Light Of God Shines Eternal, one of their most poignant and refined records to date. Great Many Arrows, their latest full-length and Posh Isolation's 200th release, continues on this route, showing the duo at their most polished and musical.
Though "Arrow 3" and "Arrow 4" are eerily serene, that doesn't mean the duo have mellowed out, exactly. Their sonic violence is smeared all over the record, especially in the album's opening tracks. Rahbek's anguished spoken word and jagged howls slash away at "Arrow 1" and "Arrow 2"'s orchestral elegance as noisy industrial blasts shred them some more. They're beautiful and awe-inspiring, like Roly Porter or Paul Jebanasam meets Whitehouse. "Arrow 6" might be the best track of all. It cloaks its deadliness in aching gorgeousness—a pleasure-pain trick that Rahbek has turned into an art form. Great Many Arrows is Damien Dubrovnik's most hospitable body of work, a space you'll want to crawl into and linger in for a while.
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