FAUNA unveil the first glimpse into their upcoming offering

“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.

The album will be released on September 26 via Prophecy Productions and  is now available for pre-order on this link: http://lnk.spkr.media/fauna-ochre-ash.

Tracklist:
1. A Conjuring
2. Nature & Madness
3. Femoral Sun
4. Labyrinths
5. Mockery
6. Eternal Return

Listen to the first revealed track from the album, “Nature & Madness”:

The band states about the song:
“A door opens from primordial chaos; “Nature and Madness” spills forth. A fever dream of incarnation, suffering and ecstasy; the myth and the mirror of selfhood. Discordant threads emerge and gather, twisting spire-ward, pyre-ward, to assemble a monument of disparate yet interwoven strands, which comprises the whole tangled truth of existence. We scale onward unto that pinnacle, in desperation and inspiration, offering self as sacrifice against its own becoming. To travel shadowed paths toward further stages of incarnation, ascending toward the underworld, descending into celestial abyss. This segment of the greater work unraveled itself unbidden in a reverie inspired by the book of the same name by Paul Shepard, which speaks of the dissonance generated by the modern mind’s inability to reconcile two simultaneous but contradictory truths. This dissonance leapt to life in musical form, itself a contradictory truth. Winding its way through the serpentine mind as surely as water seeks its source, uniting highest peak with deepest ocean. Attuning ourselves to this dissonance, allowing it to permeate and take root within our spirits, we re-member another way of Being.”