Golden Donna The Damage Has Been Done

Prolific Portland producer Joel Shanahan characterizes his latest collection in varied terms: “a flex; multidimensional; batshit; uncompromising.” All are accurate. Golden Donna has long been the outlet for Shanahan’s most omnivorous sonic tendencies but The Damage Has Been Done is dizzying and dazzling even by the project’s restlessly high standards. Blasted kicks rev into jittery wormholes of technoid energy, alternately claustrophobic and cathartic, tranced and troubled. Melancholic pads map footpaths across dim dance floors, spirits swirling from the speakers as the walls close in.

The EP’s five songs successfully translate the fever dream of Golden Donna’s sweaty, spiraling live performances into vividly deliberate multi-tracked compositions: accelerated but exacting, explosively precision-mapped, achieved via method, madness, and “arranging the fuck out of tracks.” The title took root a few years back, during a heightened window of “personal hells and ugly changes,” consumed by a sense of being at the threshold to nowhere, frustrated and futureless. This is music of emotional exorcism and rhythmic liberation, embracing challenge and change within and without.