[Photo Credit: Jolie M-A]
The forthcoming collaborative album from RAGANA and DROWSE – Ash Souvenir – combines the former’s heavy, emotionally charged metal with the latter’s textural approach to sound. Across four long-form pieces, their voices and instruments move between stark intimacy and overwhelming intensity. During the writing process, Maria (RAGANA) and Kyle (DROWSE) were both in a painful, transitional period, moving back to the Pacific Northwest to be closer to struggling loved ones. This return home and the emotions it stirred echoed in Noel’s (RAGANA) own inherited history.
Maria laments on the album’s title track, “‘Ash Souvenir’ is a song dedicated to my mom. I got to play her this song before she died and she really liked it. At the end she is all I can think about when I say ‘there is nothing to lose’ over and over until it’s a meditation. The words poured through me from my mom somehow. I think it means we don’t take anything with us when we die, we don’t have to worry about things, just people and mountains.”
Ash Souvenir Track List:
- In Eternal Woods Pts. 1-3
- After Image
- In Eternal Woods Pt. 4
- Ash Souvenir