About

THE DC3 BIO
Before you read The DC3 bio, cop a load of these:

“Birds Of Tokyo is an album that carries with it the weight of one man’s world… the entire emotional gamut of a love lost, and the broken heart it left in its wake; set to music of depth and complexity.”

“The new world of The Drones is an exotic place, one populated by dark corners, rarely explored avenues, sparse canvases and dense, exhilarating peaks and troughs.”

“After a trip to LA to play a pair of sold-out shows, soaking up the heady atmosphere of cards, cars and tequila, Taasha (The Audreys) headed off to backpack around India.”

Wow, eh?

Well, don’t go expecting anything that fancy here. We’re just not good enough to come up with phrases like “melancholy wrestles with violent guitars and singer Liddiard’s incendiary voice lights up his angular poetry”. Sorry and all.

Here’s the go:

The DC3 is a band. There’s three of them. No surprises so far.

• Douglas Lee Robertson plays bass and sings. He used to be in The Ice Cream Hands, classicist power pop critics’ darlings of the Melbourne indie scene. Douglas Lee will bring the melody to this murky mix.
• Henri Grawe was born in Germany, and lived just about everywhere. He is a jazz-trained sax player, guitarist, keyboardist, studio engineer and soundtrack composer. He played punk rock in Barcelona, “kosmische musik” in Bremen, ran contraband in Morocco, and now runs a building company. He can do Coltrane, or kitchens. Take your pick.
• Damian Cowell plugs in a machine, hits the odd drum, but mostly raves on like a street-corner preacher. He claims to be the guy from TISM. This is likely to evoke three possible responses: (1) He must be pretty clever. (2) I never liked them anyway. (3) Who?

The three men got together in the nominally alt-country outfit “ROOT!” for two albums. That project ended, and now they’re back, just the three of them, sans cowboy hats, pseudonyms, or real drummers.

They plan to make music that is both intellectually engaging and stupidly propulsive. But not as pompous as that sentence.

Guitars, laptops and ranting. That’s the recipe.

The backstory…

In 2010, renowned art collector David Walsh commissioned Damian Cowell to write an album for the January 2011 opening of MONA, Walsh’s $80 million art museum. The album, “Vs. Art” is now part of the “Monanism” exhibition. During the writing and recording of this album, Cowell disbanded his then current group “ROOT!” and began work with two core members Grawe and Robertson on a new project. This became The DC3, releasing its first track on iTunes in December 2010 and performing for the first time at the opening of MONA in January. The DC3 marks Cowell’s return to his “plastic roots”, combined with the songcraft of Robertson and Grawe’s loose cannon experimentalism.