DARK BOMBASTIC EVENING – 12th edition review

When you type the final word of an event’s summary/review, it feels like only then you somehow leave it behind you. And I still don’t want to do it and accept that Dark Bombastic Evening festival, 2026, has already ended. And it’s been at least 2 weeks now but given how beautiful each of the minutes spent among those old citadel walls in Transylvania and among those beautiful souls, everything is still vivid and I find myself giggling at the multitude of small jokes and gimmick and cool encounters and smile at the memories of timelessness and just ‘I can really be happy for being here and now and don’t need anything else’. While it mainly depends on us to reach this state, an event like DBE multiplies the chances for this kind of mood.

I have written a more detailed intro last year and I’m sending you to read it here – https://eternal-terror.com/2025/09/01/dark-bombastic-evening-2025-review/ – to know what makes this event so special and unique compared to tons of other musical events I’ve attended. This year had no local artists displaying throughout the event like it did last year, but everything else was still there. Including the delicious local food, almost home made like. Sadly, the monopoly like aspect of the bar business became very visible as all of a sudden the choice of drinks is way more limited and identical to most other bars you go to – same umbrellas, same few types of beers. Sad and boring but a common trend. What I mean to say is I miss having the choice to drink several good dark beers at the festival, but that allowed for more water and better mornings. You needed lots of water anyway, given how hot it was.

2026 edition had an extra touch of special and personal and intimate as the opening evening, Wednesday August 12th, hosted such a unique performance: “Hamlet” by Aualeu, a contemporary experience where theater meets live music and vice-versa. With the live music composed by Norbert Lovasz and Sol Faur, no text nor speech, just 3 actors, masks and props, guitars, bass (played often with a bow), tenor and soprano voices, massive drumming and stellar guest performance by multi-artist Costin Chioreanu who fine-tuned the atmosphere with a lot of extra effects placed on his crowded table.

A private production, all built up by the artists, designed, composed, invented, improvised by them and delivered with a mix of magic and inspiration, as a dagger became a shovel, a plastic foil helped with a phantom impression, an unheard sound made for some cool extra beat here and there. While the artists might have noticed more of the mistakes done on stage, compared with what they had in mind, I think the only negative comments I heard from those I spoke with were in the lines of ‘I am not sure I understood everything as I can barely remember the story of Hamlet and now I have to read it’. Besides that, most comments could be summarized in various amounts of ‘Wooooow’s. It was mesmerizing! It could have lasted few more hours and would have been equally interesting and captivating. While it was filmed by several cameras, I am not sure it will ever be fully released. Nor if it will ever be performed again. And I actually hope not, because it will keep it as such a special moment shared with few other hundreds of people present there on a blessed Wednesday evening.

For the sake of remembering this after many years:
Hamlet @ Dark Bombastic Evening 2026
Location: Poarta 7 Spațiile RYMA Cetatea Alba Carolina Alba Iulia
By Shakespeare. Musicians Ovidiu Mihaita Sol Faur Norbert Lovasz Costin Chioreanu Tudor Adam
With performers: Denis Matei Anastasia Diana Miulescu HEX
Guest stars: Ana Camelia Stefanescu & Zeno Popescu
Feat Iulian Apopei & Romeo Cioabă

Photo galleries from this evening as captured by maestro Miluta Flueras https://www.facebook.com/media/set/?vanity=miluta.ro&set=a.1589771745869131

Oh, also for the sake of memories, it was also the Wednesday with a solar eclipse and we were allowed – prior to the Hamlet show – to go up the citadel walls and watch the sun darkening. A hill in the distance has stolen the moment for everyone and made sure it fully hid the sun in advance. You could hear everyone going up on the wall saying ‘oh….well’, taking some photos, making some jokes and then heading back down. Oh well. DBE is more memorable than an eclipse anyway. Hamlet by Aualeu is more memorable than an eclipse actually!

The rest of the evening was, for many, filled with long dialogues about everything and nothing and moving around from table to table and catching up with those beautiful faces one only meets at such events and with whom you establish a very deep but short connection and which is rather difficult to explain in words. But it would be very difficult to trade them for anything.

The actual festival started Thursday afternoon and this year it mainly managed to keep to the plan: each band got around 50 minutes to play, then a 30 (?) minutes break during which the same medley is to be played, then the next band and so on. And no more past midnight concerts that can lead to some complaints. First band on were the Norwegian dark and dirty rock’n’rollers in Årabrot. Being the one guilty for their presence at the festival, I spent my time between headbanging wildly and peaking to see what the crowd thinks of this extravagant duo dressed in white (not that the drummer can be ignored, but Karin and Kjetil certainly steal the show). The first song had people quiet and circumspect but it didn’t take long for them to clap loudly, start to dance and headbang and show the appreciation for whatever unpredictable that happens on stage. For me, Årabrot was love at first sight and I’m lucky enough to have watched them 3 or 4 times already. I believe they stole some more hearts in Transylvania that afternoon. Their live approach is abrasive and visceral, balancing distorted rock’n’roll swagger with darker, more experimental textures, which makes them a particularly effective contrast to the ‘slower’ or more atmospheric acts. The band’s intensity works best when the songs feel on the verge of coming apart, having the artists thump down with more madness and making you want more. And they had a wonderful sound throughout the show, which surely helped with the good first impression.  Hope their touring arrangements will lead to more events in Eastern Europe so they can tell their crazy story of darkness and light.

Evoken brought the festival deep into funeral-doom territory, replacing Årabrot’s nervous energy with an enormous sense of darker days and deep felt duration. Their performance is built around crushing guitar and bass tones, the background for a suffocating atmosphere in which individual riffs creep out slowly from a wall of sound. The band doesn’t rely on any visuals but keep building up the physical pressure of the music and the discipline with which they sustain it. In the intimate RYMA setting, that oppressive scale must have made for one of the evening’s most immersive experiences, especially for those who looked forward to experience them live. Even if their latest album came out in 2025, I didn’t get a chance to familiarize myself with it, but I recall how massive it sounded and I am sure the band managed to deliver some of that sound during the live show.

In 2025, the Belgian act Kwoon ended up being a one man army as the singer and multi-instrumentalist Sandy Lavallart traveled alone as his bandmates were caught in other commitments. And while the 2025 experience allowed him to share more personal details about his music and life, I am happy to also get to witness the full lineup delivering post-rock’s gradual accumulation of texture and volume. While each song seemed to have a lazy start, I remember the music making me move wildly and feeling like it has enough power to lead me to some awesome dimensions, as songs moved from fragile, spacious passages into enormous crescendos. The live performance felt cinematic when I paid attention to the beautiful projections on the backdrop, and everything was particularly suited to an open-air festival surrounded by the architecture of Alba Iulia Fortress and whose main focus is to deliver very emotional shows.

Wolvennest is another act that performed in 2025 and I remember that they also got me dancing wildly with their hypnotic collision of psychedelic rock, doom, drone and dark metal. Their live identity is less about conventional song-by-song dynamics than about creating a sustained trance, with repetitive riffs, heavy low end and psychedelic textures gradually pulling the audience deeper into the performance. Sadly, the strong incense smell from the stage made my stomach unhappy and I had to move around a lot and eventually gave up, located a chair in front of the bar and watched the performance from afar – while dancing on the chair, together with some other friends who thought the idea wasn’t too bad. The same friends joined later for the afterparty and we danced some of the night out. And while the ritualistic experience led by the Belgian act was in some ways, predictable, the afterparty and its new DJ (or DJs) have taken the mood to other directions than the previous years. Sometimes good, sometimes bad, we all complained that it was better before but we all kept dancing and, as human nature has it, we’ll probably complain again next year no matter who the DJ is. But it was good with some late night partying as it’s not something I do often lately, but DBE offers the best of spaces and ambiance and crowd for it. I wish I had the capacity to charge my batteries with only 2-3 hours of sleep and so I could do this 3-4 nights in a row. But nowadays I have to pick which nights are meant for dancing and which for rest.

Photo gallery from Day 1 of DBE 2026 https://www.facebook.com/media/set/?vanity=miluta.ro&set=a.1590599369119702

Friday started with a lot of sun and several curious souls gathered in front of the stage, where three youngsters dressed in black (and a topless drummer) showed up, didn’t say a word and just started building up one of the most magic hours of my concert experiences. When the ritualistic drum rhythms begun, they had my full dedicated attention and haven’t lost it for a second until the end of the show. A very sweaty show for those of us who couldn’t stand still. Belgian act Pothamus and their combined sludge/post-metal heaviness with repetitive drones and tribal percussion took us to really intense trips with each of their hypnotic tunes, creating mantras like states and making it easier to forget you’re at a metal show and not during a fascinating ritual. Their performance was one of the clearest expressions of the festival’s preference for music that creates an altered state rather than simply delivering conventional metal songs. They climbed high up on the list of bands I’ll have to experience again and again and again.

I haven’t fully landed from the above experience when the Germans in Heretoir started performing and I could only briefly get into a right mood for their more aggressive (yet emotional) extreme metal tendencies combined with the melancholy of post rock.  Their live sound delivers heavy contrasts – harsh vocals and tremolo-picked guitars can suddenly give way to more open, melodic passages and the band members are very emotionally involved in delivering their compositions, which was highly appreciated by the loud cheering crowd. Then the evening became more extreme and aggressive with the Australian act Mesarthim and their atmospheric black metal, blended with prominent electronic and cosmic-synth textures. As the vocalist covers his face with what one can consider ‘the future of face masks’ – aka an LCD (?) oval able to display moving patterns, which were well suited with the astral tone of their music. They have debuted live a couple of years ago and seem to have already figured out their stage presence and know how to step out of the conventional and more uplifting that other bands in this genre. The overall impression was music that feels simultaneously cold, expansive and surprisingly danceable beneath its black-metal surface. For a festival like DBE, they were an important bridge between the extreme-metal contingent and its experimental/electronic side.

The day’s headliner seems to have had some delays at the border so they had to perform a quick sound check between shows, but politely informed us that they might be a bit delayed. But as this was the last show of their current tour, the band didn’t spend too much time preparing and started performing only few minutes after the announced time and that’s always very respectful towards the festival and the crowd. Their cinematic post-rock show was turning instrumental post-rock into a study in tension, silence and overwhelming release. With some obsessive moving projections in the background and very dedicated musicians, This Will Destroy offered probably the most controlled dynamics: delicate guitar patterns accumulated layer by layer until the sound became physically massive, before retreating again into spacious passages. As this tour marked their 20th anniversary, it surely felt special to get to witness one of these powerful shows, filled with masterfully crafted swings of explosions and calm moments. I wasn’t familiar with their music before DBE but now I have another band that is on my ‘MUST’ check-out list.

The night had an extra show, but on the smaller stage – the one where the DJ has the equipment during the late night dances. The Queenstina Project was the musical debut of Cristina Cândea, founder of RYMA  Association and who is the person who has been welcoming the DBE community at Alba Iulia, year after year. She now decided to step on stage and perform her own songs from an upcoming album – Curriculum Vitae—a collection of deeply personal stories about identity, love, loss, friendship, hope, and the invisible forces that shape our lives. Written together with pianist Gyusi Kadar and brought to life by a band whose members come from fields as diverse as medicine, telecommunications, engineering and music, this is not an album launch, but the very first live chapter of a journey that is only just beginning. And as much as I would have wanted to grasp the story better than just the presentation text, the weird acoustic of the walls made it impossible. It was never easy to hear what she was trying to say between songs (people talking didn’t really help, but most of the talkers were just wondering what was being said on stage). And the sound of the music didn’t travel too well either. So after a couple of songs we stepped away from the area and actually retreated to our accommodation rather early and missed the party afterwards. But a long sleep was welcome as the Saturday morning had some friends and me going hiking to the nearby geothermal or spa town of Geoagiu-Bai – which combines Roman history and archaeological sites with the possibility to enjoy a bath in the village’s pool or stay at one of the many hotels and resorts. We also did a short hike to see the Rapa Rosie, a small and beautiful canyon located on the way back to Alba Iulia. Don’t drive a delicate car there as some of the road is rocky and bumpy.

Day 2 of DBE by photographer Miluta Flueras https://www.facebook.com/media/set/?vanity=miluta.ro&set=a.1591526175693688

After the morning travels, the last day of DBE with its last four bands ended up being a bit lazier than the previous ones, as I ended up sitting down way more often than usual, but that’s because of a lovely bunch of people who have the best of dialogues about any subject one might consider (i)relevant at that moment. And they’d make sure there’s always a seat available if someone stops by, so my feet were actually the ones that dictated my often visits there. Anyway. First act on, British/Spanish doom act delivering gothic doom and building up to an intimate and emotionally vulnerable sound, drawing on atmospheric alternative/experimental rock. As a side note, I guess each band invited to perform at this festival has its kind of experimental, else they wouldn’t be here. A relatively newly formed act, Opia was an ideal day opener as they created a darker, more inward atmosphere to have you pass the hot hours of the afternoon. Their set seems to have functioned as a quiet reset before the heavier performances that followed.

For example the Swedish ambient black metal act Skuggor, up next on the stage, brought a distinctly shadowy, atmospheric form of metal to the Saturday programm. The duo’s performance occupied the darker end of the festival’s spectrum and helped maintain the slow-burning atmosphere of the final day, with their deep riffs and cold and distant pacing. Some drum patterns and nice chords choices have caught my attention a few times, but I must admit I haven’t fully gotten into the mood for this act. I was also super excited for the upcoming performance from the Dutch darkjazz maestros, the Kilimanjaro Darkjazz Ensemble. When I first saw them at DBE many years ago, it was the first year I started to taste such experimental acts as this festival manages to put together in a wonderful fashion. I can’t say I understood much of it back then. But by now, more than 10 years later, I know what I’m getting myself into and all my senses were ready for this concert which effectively dissolved the distinction between concert and audiovisual experience.  The band’s music draws on dark jazz, ambient, doom, post-rock and electronic experimentation, with the ensemble’s history rooted in creating alternative soundtracks for silent cinema. And they keep the crowd interaction to a minimum and to many smiles. But you are there with them, on the stage and in each instrument, even those that are pre-recorded. They take you from slow moves to insanely massive moments of pure bliss and beautiful darkness. It was, in a way, the proper ending of the dark Bombastic Evening, as the remaining act delivered another kind of headlining experience.

Old Man’s Child has been received with a lot of interest and cheers when they were announced for DBE and the Norwegian symphonic black metal act needs little introduction to those who follow the genre. They brought more speed and riff-driven momentum than all the other acts combined and they surely got the crowd going wild. Galder knows how to handle the crowd through gestures and looks and everyone in the band is in a great mood and delivers with skills hard to ignore. Their appearance was especially notable because the Norwegians have been relatively inactive compared with many of the other names on the bill, making the DBE performance feel like something of a special occasion. The music gave the audience sharper rhythmic movement and a more traditional extreme-metal punch and were received with loud cheers and hopes for a way longer set than they have delivered. As it felt more difficult to find a spot in front of the stage, I ended up watching most of it from the side and amusing myself at other drummers air-drumming along Tjodalv. But his drum mastery was indeed quite a sight and you don’t often get this spot at usual concerts, so I just took advantage by the open side-stage space. And when the concert ended, I found it rather fulfilling and recharging to watch the whole crowd erupting and cheering as the lights were brightly shining both on their faces and the band members waving goodbye.

Photos from last day of DBE 2026 by Miluta Flueras https://www.facebook.com/media/set/?vanity=miluta.ro&set=a.1592381532274819

There….it ended eventually. I am happy and lucky to have witnessed it live. Actually, this summer I have attended another one stage – awesome bands&awesome people festival, this one in the middle of Sweden and called Kröckbacken festival, focused more on fuzz and stoner and psychedelic music, but I think there might be a chance for some overlapping bands there in the future. And while I totally see and respect the need for days filled with big and great acts at big events, I’m hoping there’s more room (and $$$) for one stage festivals for many years to come. They make it all way more personal and the connection established there are small life treasures.

Once again, super grateful to Doru and Daiana and their team for making all this possible. I have heard so many honest thanks transmitted to them, throughout all editions of DBE that I have attended, both by bands and by attendees. I hope that by now they know how much their efforts have given people a chance to smile and have awesome memories to look back to. And hopefully they have their own share of memories, combined with the madness of running an international event in the middle of Transylvania. While 12 is a round number in certain contexts, 13 is filled with superstitions for some. Maybe 13 is also the Sum Of R, given how many of the project’s members have performed at DBE already. But 13 comes also with positive and sacred energy, just like the 13 full moons in one year or the Fruit of Life itself that consists of 13 circles. Nobody knows yet whether there’ll be a 13th DBE. But, with hopes for such a special edition either next year, in 2 years or in 10 and with the biggest of thanks for the existing ones so far, I bid you a good rest of your day and thank you for reading this far.