Fauna - Ochre & Ash [2 LP Oxblood red]

Ocher & Ash is Fauna's fourth full-length album, a shamanic ritual of death and rebirth pressed on oxblood red double vinyl, which is perhaps the most appropriate color choice yet.

Fauna formed in Olympia, Washington in 2004, with the goal of exploring shamanism and atavism, the reappearance of traits that human culture supposedly left behind. This impulse became black metal, and Fauna helped found Cascadian black metal alongside Agalloch and Wolves in the Throne Room, a scene less interested in the theater of "corpsepaint" than in authentic ritual. Ocher & Ash takes this even further. Six tracks look like a normal album on the back cover, but the band has constructed it as one continuous piece, three songs stitched together with ambient interludes into a single shamanic journey, a ritual death, a harrowing passage and a rebirth on the other side.

Nature & Madness begins the album with the most direct sense of terror in the work, Femoral Sun buries a real chorus under layers of tremolo and ritual drone, and Mockery is the moment where the trying passage becomes physical, with its blast beats and buried chants. Eternal Return closes the cycle exactly where a rebirth should land, calm and strangely warm, echoing the ocher and ash that ancient hands once pressed onto the cave walls of Cueva de las Manos.

This oxblood red pressing also makes the ritual physical.