Aural Aggravation

FAUNA drop an excerpt from the epic over 23-minute long song ‘Eternal Return’ as the third and final advance single taken from the forthcoming album Ochre & Ash.
The Cascadian black metal duo’s fourth full-length has been slated for release on September 26, 2025.

FAUNA comment: “Journeying everward, through this nothingness comprised of all that has ever been and all that will ever be, we see”, vocalist, guitarist, and bass player Echtra writes on behalf of the duo. “World creates awareness and awareness creates world, collapsing the very self that knows in its moment of knowing. And in that gnosis becomes whole again. And thus we are born anew from nothingness. Come and become, life eats itself, womb and tomb combined. Fecund chaos, sickening soup of morass and murk, birth and rebirth; the void vomits its entrails forth, they coalesce into form, and swim off into the bog.”

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.

The oldest cave paintings date back over 60,000 years, which puts them into the age of two older members of the human family tree, Neanderthals and Denisovans. When modern humans or homo sapiens emerged out of Africa, they mixed with their predecessors and continued to use ochre and ash to paint images in caves.

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. This follows a distinct shamanic sequence: preparation for death and then the moment of death, descent to the underworld, a passage through the lands below, and the painful rebirth into a morass of Being.

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.

FAUNA were formed as an antidote to the alienation of the modern human spirit and dedicated to cultivating lost channels of the human condition. 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.

FAUNA view their music as a collection of experience and ritual, intended to shake free the contemporary mind and bring listeners back to a more primal and free existence. They consider live rites as the true main event. These live rituals evolved into recorded echoes simply out of necessity. FAUNA desired to open their work to those who might seek it, and to share their passion for a return to primal spiritual states with people outside of the damp, vast forests of the Pacific Northwest of Cascadia.
FAUNA’s debut album Rain (2006) shared the story of homo sapiens’ evolutionary path, and our struggle to survive in the modern world. 2007’s The Hunt explores another stage in that human trajectory through the lens of a mythic hunt, followed by Avifauna in 2012 – with the title paying tribute to birds and the spiritual meaning these winged cousins provide.

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.

AA