Cascadian black metal duo Fauna has revealed an epic track, "Labyrinths", from its forthcoming fourth full-length, Ochre & Ash, chalked up for release on 26 September via Lupus Lounge.

Fauna's vocalist, guitarist, and bass player, Echtra, writes on behalf of the duo: "The portal opens – not without, but within the very centre of our being. We tumble inward in toric inversion, spirit turning inside out, outside in; an ouroboros of Being cycled through its own orifice, through and beyond all semblance of possibility. The vortex ends in neither inferno nor cavernous abyss, but cacophonous silence. A desert of presence, a no-place devoid even of space. Absence so total that it contains all that could possibly be and yet lies barren. Abstract potential, bucking and roiling and spurting forth, overflowing with nothing. No psychopomp beckons, no hand extends. There is only what is not. This section of the work crystallised under the pressure created by a spiritual dismemberment. Plunging into an underworld within, to traverse those shadowy internal landscapes, to discover that which is formless within and fall through it into oneself".

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 takes listeners and participants in its 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 a new form.

Although Ochre & Ash looks like a regular album with six tracks at a superficial glance, it is 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 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. Link