Slowcore and black metal seem like diametrically opposed concepts. The former is often glacial, quiet, and ambient; the latter is usually brash, noisy, and technical. As Drowse, Kyle Bates stitches together textural tapestries that feel both tactile and nebulous, like a raincloud you can touch. Maria and Noel, the mononymous faces of doom duo Ragana, are famous for their torrential outpourings of riffs and blastbeats. Theoretically, it shouldn’t work. But everything—the misty atmospherics, the thunderous percussion, the crackling guitars—comes together like a perfect storm.
On Ragana and Drowse’s debut collaborative album, Ash Souvenir, those contradictory styles harmonize. At the center, both artists discover the duality latent in each other’s own work while forging a new path together. Gnarled screams and soothing atmospheres overlap, making the Pixies’ quiet-loud formula seem quaint by comparison. Across its four discrete compositions, Ash Souvenir is a compelling meeting of the minds, a demonstration in seemingly disparate genres coalescing more often than they clash.
Both artists hail from the Pacific Northwest, a part of the country known for its dreary weather as much as its idyllic natural scenery. Even though Ash Souvenir was originally commissioned for and performed at Roadburn Festival in the Netherlands, the music itself feels beholden to the PNW for its striking fusion of tranquility and cacophony. Its studio version was also recorded in Anacortes, Washington, and its thematic concerns, such as the byproducts of the 1980 eruption of Mount Saint Helens, firmly embed it in the region’s murky milieu.
Aside from its recurring geographic motifs, Ash Souvenir broadly explores grief and how we carry it, but its creators locate that collective mourning through pointedly personal experiences. “In Eternal Woods Pts. 1-3” opens with a spoken-word passage from Noel’s grandmother in Latvian, her native tongue; she escaped the Soviet-occupied Latvia in the 1940s and lived her remaining days in the United States. “In a sunny clearing / With flowers blooming / The sap is rising / The way is open,” Noel screams, their delivery blood-curdling and urgent. Maria’s pummeling blastbeats eventually yield to finger-picked acoustic guitar, as if dense, dark clouds have parted to reveal a peaceful glade, its grass dewy from the preceding downpour. It’s emblematic of the voyages we make, from our birthplaces to foreign lands, from the living world to our inevitable deaths.
The closing title track expresses a hunger for home, a return to the familiar backdrops that frame youth and evoke memories with loved ones. “I have been cold since I left the Northwest,” Maria sings at the beginning of the song, her voice clean and wistful, referring to her relocation from Olympia to Oakland (they moved back home last year). She goes on to mention her upbringing in Puyallup near the river, where a mountain looms over the land and becomes visible in clear weather. Its jagged peaks conjure images of her mother, who appears in her dreams, alive again, to declare an undying mantra: “There is nothing to lose.”
Bates and Maria trade that lyric back and forth over gossamer, reverb-drenched guitars and Noel’s washes of suspended cymbals. The more that maxim is spoken, it transforms into a grounded truth, a reality borne of dreams. When the drums fully kick in, and the guitars layer over one another in a rich, swooning rainfall, Maria substitutes singing for screaming. The line that was previously uttered with reverent calm is now howled with ferocious exigency. Like Ash Souvenir as a whole, this swift change simultaneously blurs and reifies everything around it. Those juxtaposing thoughts, the lines delineating fact and fantasy, noise and quietude, are erased. The passage of memory and time and the evidence of what came before, however, leave indelible marks. The remaining ash is a reminder.
Grant Sharples is a writer, journalist and critic. His work has also appeared in Interview, Uproxx, Pitchfork, Stereogum, The Ringer, Los Angeles Review of Books, and other publications. He lives in Kansas City.
