A lot of extremely cool projects have come together because of the Roadburn Festival, an annual celebration of the more experimental ends of the the heavy music underground. That's why Converge got together with Chelsea Wolfe, Ben Chisholm, and Stephen Brodsky to make Bloodmoon: I, and it's how Thou and Emma Ruth Rundle got together to make May Our Chambers Be Full. Now, we can add another one to that tally, since the great Pacific Northwest queer black metal duo Ragana have gotten together with Portland drone artist Drowse to release Ash Souvenir, a new collaborative LP originally commissioned by Roadburn in 2024.
Ragana have been making raw, intense, emotional DIY music for a long time, and their most recent album, 2023's crushing Desolation's Flower, was an easy Album Of The Week pick for us. Drowse, Kyle Bates' one-man project, makes deeply sad music that blurs lines between indie rock and drone; he released his Wane Into It LP in 2022. Together, Ragana and Drowse got together to make an album loosely inspired by the 1980 Mount St. Helens eruption and the ash that it left across the Pacific Northwest.
When they recorded Ash Souvenir, both Kyle Bates and Ragana member Maria had recently returned to the Pacific Northwest to care for ailing relatives. They premiered the piece together at Roadburn, and then they recorded it at Unknown studio in Anacortes, Washington. It's only got four tracks, but those four track promise to go deep. The album opens with the roiling, pulverizing six-minute track "In Eternal Woods Pts. 1-3," the second two parts of which serve as the first single. It's inspired by the life of Ragana member Noel's grandmother, who escaped occupied Latvia in the '40s and who lived in a log cabin in Shelton, Washington. Noel says that the song is about "loss and memory and love." They continue:
It’s about sacred places and benevolent ancestors. It’s me standing in the sunlit woods surrounding my Grandma Rasma’s rural Washington cabin, feeling her spirit in everything. My childhood summers were spent in my Grandma’s magical presence, listening to her stories, hunting for chanterelles, singing Latvian folk songs, and playing in the forest. My grandma and her family fled Latvia after the second Soviet occupation of World War 2; despite everything she endured, she was always looking to the future with hope, but she made sure to teach my sister and I about the past, made sure we had a connection to our culture and ancestors. She passed away in 2023 after suffering with dementia for ten years; it was my first experience losing someone bit by bit, helpless against the tide of time sweeping away the person I knew, but still able to share love, to hold her hand and sing to her the way she once sang to me. Incorporating audio clips from old home videos, a verse of Latvian folk poetry known as a Daina, and a prayer for her journey into the next world, with this4 part song I hoped to express even a fragment of my infinite love for her, and my gratitude for everything she was and everything she taught me.
This is going to be special. Below, check out "In Eternal Woods Pts. 2 & 3" and the Ash Souvenir tracklist.
TRACKLIST:
01 "In Eternal Woods Pts. 1-3"
02 "After Image"
04 "In Eternal Woods Pt. 4"
05 "Ash Souvenir"
Ash Souvenir is out 11/14 on the Flenser.
