In the middle of a hot July summer, the Turbina’s club room is cooling down – to counterbalance the sun and the heat, this evening will be refreshing with icy synth waves of cold wave, EBM and post punk, distant guitars and cold, raw drum machines.
COLD CONTRAST: Debuting in the summer of 2023, Cold Contrast will be the only act of the Hungarian dark scene to play their previously released and popular songs, as well as more songs from their first album, ‘Outland’, which is also on Telekom Szelektor’s POP compilation, in several versions. The latest single ‘My Emptiness’ will also be played, which has been featured on several foreign music channels, radio and DJ mixes with great success, and of course the debut ‘Misdeed’, which has been one of the band’s most popular works ever since. Having toured Gyöngyö, Szeged and Budapest several times during the winter-spring season (as opening act for Swiss Durian or at the sold-out Gothic Disorder Festival), Cold Contrast is constantly adding new songs to their repertoire – this time they will also be performing compositions that the audience has never heard before or only once. The band’s sound mixes classic post-punk, darkwave with some harder, more modern electronic or even pop elements, all with a synthesizer and drum machine sound of the 80s. Fans of Boy Harsher, She Past Away, Molchat Doma, The Cure, Depeche Mode or Lebanon Hanover will surely hear some melancholic songs at the concert, which will be a good way to get a good sad.
CAWATANA: Cawatana, with a long history in Budapest (formerly in Békéscsaba), started its activities in this form in 2018, purchasing and deploying analogue synthesizers, drum machines and sequencers, breaking with the previous software solutions and switching to a purely hardware-based operation. Previously, they were very active on the international scene, playing a lot of gigs abroad, making it to the best and biggest festivals (e.g. they played twice at the Wave Gotik Treff in Leipzig, the world’s biggest “dark music festival”), but then they stopped performing for several years, started playing again in 2020 and returned to the scene a year ago. In their latest show (recently featured on Hungarian Television), elements of analogue synth/minimal wave, darkwave with heavy drum machine beats and post-punk with powerful bass guitar are perfectly combined with coldwave vocoder vocals.
SEPARATED LAMB: Danceable, one-minute EBM short stories about religious trauma, identity crisis, relationship with God, growing up, and what the city at night has ultimately shaped you into. Since 2019, I’ve been creating new songs for myself for the first time, and a few months ago for a “digital circle” of people who are receptive to darker themes, yet danceable songs, mostly releasing childhood repressions and letting aggression go to the wind. I use an ipad to create the foundations of the songs, accompanied by drum machines, and I sing lines from notes I’ve written, mostly late at night, to express what I may not have been able to articulate in the past. Or couldn’t. So the sometimes more aggressive base is coupled with a more subtle, one might say intimate, symbolic theme. This time I am giving my third concert, gradually preparing myself for the fact that perhaps the days of secretly writing songs and prayers to myself on notes and in a drawer are over.
Everyone is welcome to come and get a glimpse of this subculture, and of course those who are already regular visitors to dark events – there will be something new and exciting for everyone this evening.
