Dadub - How to Shoulder the Radiance of Revelations (2025)

Since emerging from Berlin's cavernous techno underworld in the early 2010s, Italian expatriates Daniele Antezza and Marco Donnarumma have continuously excavated the depths of dub techno's increasingly fallow soil and the wider ranging world of bass music. Their Stroboscopic Artefacts releases established them as architects of meticulous sonic landscapes where industrial rigidity meets spectral atmospherics. The Ohm Resistance releases turned up the saturation again with a new intensity of steppin dreadnaughts and paranoid limb twitches. Yet nothing in their formidable catalog prepares the listener for the transmutational journey that is "How to Shoulder the Radiance of Revelations."

This astonishing opus detonates expectations with opening track "Now See" seamlessly weaving between claustrophobic industrial dub territories commandeered by the razor-sharp MC-knife-play of Grove. Their vocals ugly-purring through disorienting passages where minimal rhythmic frameworks support deeply fused dub and industrial skree. "ShellBreak" delivers pneumatic bass pressure and serpentine percussion supplemented by the lithe argument of TaliaBle, suggesting familiar Dadub terrain before "Someway, Somehow" submerges the listener into a suffocating chamber where Nova's staccato pulse ripples into a syrup-sweet chorus, voices emerging from static-laden fog, prophets of an imminent collapse.

The duo's longstanding fascination with negative space reaches apotheosis in "Hunger for Oblivion" where cavernous kicks cradle delicate twisting vocals from Sara Persico. Reeds vibrate, cybernetic dulcimers resound. These organic elements don't merely ornament the electronic foundations but enter into volatile dialogue with them, creating tension that threatens to rupture the fabric of the tracks themselves.

Throughout, an apocalyptic atmosphere permeates the proceedings—particularly in the album's sprawling centerpiece "Colliding Expanses"—not as facile dystopian posturing but as genuine revelatory dread. The production bears witness to Dadub's renowned technical mastery (joined here by Pino Basile). Utilizing bass frequencies that physically reconfigure the structure and spatial design that transforms listening environments into temporary autonomous zones of perception-altering potency. It's a lurid and hallucinatory experience as Ludovica Manzo's voice coaxes the hard-earned confession.

Most remarkably, these seemingly disparate elements--the psych-folk spirit interventions on "Mirth of Hog" (with a truly astounding summoning from the lungs of Dorian Wood) and the scorched-earth industrialism of "On the Roof of Hell Gazing at Flowers," which concludes the album with avant-garde vocalist Alessandra Eramo's deliriously disturbing vocals--cohere into a singular vision that feels not like an experiment but an inevitable evolution. Antezza and Donnarumma have crafted a hermetic system where destruction and creation exist simultaneously, where ancestral memory infiltrates futuristic architecture.

"How to Shoulder the Radiance of Revelations" stands as a monumental achievement—a work that honors dub's revolutionary sonic philosophies while fearlessly reconfiguring them for an age where traditional certainties disintegrate daily. This is music as alchemical transformation, demanding full surrender but offering profound illumination to those brave enough to shoulder its radiant weight.