Fauna - Ochre & Ash [LP]

"Ochre & Ash" is the title of the fourth full-length from Cascadian black metal shamans Fauna. Ochre and ash are also two of the main ingredients used by ancient humans to create paintings in caves. The album cover combines these two aspects by using an image from the Cueva de las Manos ("Cave of the Hands") in Argentina, where the oldest hands stencilled onto the rock date back to about 7,300 BC. Fauna are animist ministers who take listeners and participants in their live rituals back to the origins of our species, to an age of hunters and gatherers and archaic human spirituality. "Ochre & Ash" is conceived as a shamanic underworld journey, a process of ritual death, harrowing passage through unknown realms, and rebirth into new form. Although "Ochre & Ash" looks like a regular album with six tracks at a superficial glance, it is in fact intended as one whole piece that is divided into three "songs", which are interspersed with ambient interludes. The concept of "Ochre & Ash" reaches all the way back to the founding purpose of Fauna. This musical entity came into being in Olympia, Washington in 2004, when a spiritual drive to explore shamanism and atavism, which means the reemergence of traits thought to be lost from human biology and culture, birthed itself in the creation of black metal fury. Musically, Fauna soon evolved into an integral and inspirational part of the sonic revolution now known as Cascadian black metal, alongside and in creative exchange with legends such as AGALLOCH and WOLVES IN THE THRONE ROOM. With "Ochre & Ash", Fauna take their listeners on a shamanic journey back deep in time into an age of early hunters and gatherers with a black metal ritual that echoes ancient humans assembling at torchlight in dark caves to spray-paint hands, animals, and tools through hollow bone pipes with ochre and ash in an act of magic onto the bare bones of the earth.