“Thank you for clapping”. This is the response the audience receives for their massive clapping. Innocent maybe, but in this case it seems a worrying and absurd message. David Eugene Edwards (the man's name), is everything but genial entertainer.

David Eugene Edwards, who spent his childhood travelling Colorado with his grandfather, a Nazarene preacher, was given as mother's milk a cocktail of tales about suffering in hell and cardinal sin. At 17 he left his grandfather's congregation and took up a more personal relationship with God, which in turn led the old man to fear for his salvation. Edwards' beliefs are nonetheless light-years from the cosy-Christianity that we practice in this neck of woods (Denmark). For him evil is not just a word or some confused philosophical paragraph used to describe the actions of your enemy, political or cultural. Evil is evident, evil is a daily struggle within oneself! The great Russian Writer F.M Dostoevsky wrote in “Brothers Karamazov”, “Here struggle God and Satan, and the battlefield is the human soul.” These conditions for human existence can be traced in Edwards' music, which could be described as a meeting between a passionate, suffering and burning soul and a nightmarish portrait of America. He takes no distance, uses no irony or subtle soft-spoken symbolism; such elements are all peeled off. Edwards' songs concentrate fully on the eternal struggle between good and evil.

Normally Edwards can be found leading 16 Horsepower, and he was actually writing songs for a new album, when the rest of the band decided to take a break - presumably because they wanted a little distance from his religious project. Tongues spoke that this was the end of the road, but recently both band and label (Glitterhouse) reconfirmed that this was only a break. Meanwhile this restless loner has created a new outlet for his songs: Woven Hand. And that was the name under which Edwards performed a concert in the Aarhus Voxhall on the first day of May. The program read “feat. 16 Horsepower”, which off course was a mistake. But a small one since all the songs originally were meant for the mother band. Woven Hand can be considered a solo project by Edwards. On the recent album he plays nearly all instruments himself and he as produced almost the entire album as well. For the concert he had brought along a backing trio on percussion, cello and mandolin/organ respectively. This line-up arranged the songs in a subdued, almost chamber music like classical way, less powerful than the instrumentation with 16 Horsepower.

This said though, Woven Hand does not display less demonic forces or dark temptations - at least not live. So where the production on Woven Hand is almost too neat, too nice, to justify Edwards' universe, the actual concert became a possessed experience, a journey to the land of spooky Americana, swaying perpetually between Will Oldham's windblown folk and Nick Cave at his most gothic. Beyond discussion, the centre of this sermon was Edwards himself. His glaring gaze and dark preaching voice filled the room, while his fingers travelled manically up and down his collection of guitars, mandolins and other stringed instruments. With both fascination and fear, one has to admit, it seems like Edwards has learned one or two things from the old reverend. But the band accompanies him very well. It is no small musical challenge to give voice to such an introvert battle of souls, and they showed both intuition and astonishing skills to such a degree that one would like to have heard their contributions on the actual album.

Especially towards the end of the concert the vein of religion was exposed and bleeding like another stigma. Ending with a regular psalm in which Edwards accompanied by a dark organ praised Jesus. Thus, this was no banal deus-ex-machina ending, where the good son himself comes down from the skies and collectively casts out all our demons, more like a plea for help by a completely shipwrecked soul. On top of that Edwards held his guitar high up in the air - a frightening metaphor for the words of Jesus “I have not come with peace, but with swords”

“Thank you for clapping”, he said, and the clapping did not stop. Willingly Edwards came back to the stage solo, and gave a naked and therefore even more frightening version of “Black soul Choir” by 16 Horsepower, where the refrain goes “Every man is evil, every man is a liar”. Strong meat, seeing that as an audience you are used to hear little white lies, about how wonderful you were.

All in all ambivalent experience, but there's no doubt that Edwards as a musician is a unique pioneer. And that applies whether one can identify oneself with his way of seeing life or not...........there is catharsis in his songs.