CROATIAN AMOR
Croatian Amor is the solo project of Copenhagen-based artist and composer Loke Rahbek.
Across more than a decade of recordings, performances and collaborations, the project has developed an unmistakable language from ambient music, experimental electronics, field recording, fragmented pop and the residue of club culture — music in which intimacy and artificiality, beauty and unease continually overlap.
Rather than working within a fixed genre, Rahbek treats Croatian Amor as a space for constructing emotional environments. Voices, environmental recordings, digital artefacts, melody and rhythm are assembled into worlds that can feel both recognisable and strangely displaced: music concerned with closeness and distance, memory, communication and the ways contemporary life is increasingly mediated through images, devices and networks. From the haunted electronic collages of Isa and the expansive atmospheres of All in the Same Breath to the luminous Remember Rainbow Bridge and A Part of You in Everything, Croatian Amor has gradually opened its early industrial and noise vocabulary toward increasingly melodic, intimate and porous forms.
Rahbek was also a co-founder, with Christian Stadsgaard, of Posh Isolation, the Copenhagen label and artistic platform that became a defining presence in Scandinavian experimental music. Founded in 2009, Posh Isolation released almost 300 records before formally ending its label operations in 2025, leaving behind a network spanning music, visual art, publishing, design and performance that continues to inform Rahbek’s collaborative practice.
Recent years have marked another significant expansion of Croatian Amor. In 2024, Rahbek and Scandinavian Star continued their long-running collaboration with “New Healer,” featuring School of X, pushing their shared language toward an unusually direct form of emotional dance music. In March 2025, Croatian Amor reunited with Lust For Youth for the full-length All Worlds on Sacred Bones Records. Developed after the projects shared the stage at Sydney Opera House’s Vivid Live, the album takes inspiration from the Voyager Golden Record and moves between dream pop, ambient music, electronics and dance music as a collection of transmissions about contemporary human experience. A deluxe edition followed in February 2026 with the additional pieces “Someone,” featuring Purient, and “Parasol.”
Alongside these collaborations, Croatian Amor has entered a prolific new solo phase. The 2025 album Never Give Up, Pt. 1: Puer Aeternus was conceived by Rahbek as “an argument for living”: seven pieces revolving around vulnerability, persistence and the figure of the puer aeternus, the eternal youth afraid of touching ground. Its constellation of collaborators includes Niko and Alto Aria, while a developing series of releases through Bifrost has continued with “Icarus” — featuring Jeuru, 3ndles5, Frederik Valentin and Scandinavian Star — “Regret” with School of X and Niko, and the 2026 solo single “Blue House.”
At the same time, Rahbek’s work has increasingly moved beyond the conventional recording and concert format into performance, film, installation and spatial sound. In 2025 he created a soundtrack for Danish artist Esben Weile Kjær’s PEARL, presented as part of the exhibition SHELL at Amant, New York. Later that summer, Croatian Amor provided the sound for Weile Kjær’s DEEPFAKE at Salzburger Kunstverein, a performance commissioned and produced with the Salzburg Festival in which performers moved through costumes from the festival archive in a looping meditation on authenticity, image culture and unstable identity.
In 2026 this strand developed further through Rahbek’s collaboration with Canadian artist Chloe Wise on her major solo exhibition Extrasensory at Kulturstiftung Basel H. Geiger. Rahbek composed the score for Wise’s thirty-minute, three-channel film PsyFi* as well as music for a separate exhibition environment, enveloping one of its spaces in an ethereal and deliberately disorientating sonic atmosphere. During Kunsttage Basel he returned to the exhibition to present Sensory Sounds, an ambient Croatian Amor performance conceived as an extension of the installation’s acoustic world.
This movement between record, concert and exhibition is increasingly central to Croatian Amor. Rahbek’s longstanding interest in spatial composition has included work with MONOM’s 4DSOUND system in Berlin, with Croatian Amor returning to the work in a listening-session context at the SPATIAL festival in 2025. Recent live appearances have meanwhile ranged from intimate experimental venues to larger contemporary festival contexts, including Down The Rabbit Hole 2026 and AVA London at EartH.
Across these different forms, Croatian Amor remains less concerned with defining a genre than with creating a particular emotional condition. Rahbek’s work transforms fragments of pop, environmental sound, voices and electronic synthesis into spaces that hover between private memory and shared experience — intimate yet synthetic, fragile yet intensely physical, and continually searching for new ways in which sound can inhabit a room, an image or another person’s imagination.
