MUSIQUE MACHINE
This self titled album is Fearthainne debut album & it offers up two disc & over two hours worth of earthy, primal & emotional raw forest folk. The four piece project features two members of Ambient/ folk Black Metal project Fauna; & though Fearthainne are purely acoustic based project this does sometimes have the barren & angered spirit of black metal raising in it’s veins.
The bands primal sonic focus is sombre yet often quite aggressively strummed acoustic guitars. Earthy, primal, heart beat like percussion, and the odd touches of dulcimer & violin. This simple but effective backing is sang over by low, gravely & ragged yet emotional male vocals that bring to mind either Steve Von Till or Scott Kelly from Neurosis- but there’s also more soulful & more gentle edges to vocals that rises every now & then. There are also the odd hints at sweet, but forlorn folky female backing vocals too on a few occasions; but really it’s the male vocals which are the key focus here.
The albums first disc opens up with a brief, but very nice tone setting instrumental piece by Ruhr Hunter entitled ‘Awaken’ which is built around rippling/omnibus gong tones & whispered male vocals which gives the feeling that you entering a ritual for a different place & time; and now you have to clear your mind and respect the forests presence. The rest of the first disc is taken up by two 30 minute plus tracks entitled ‘Fauna’ & ‘The Veil’ ; both tracks slowly but surely weave their barren, earthy, sadly beautiful & sometimes emotional raw spirit around. The band coaxing & easy out simplistic, but emotional & highly atmospheric song craft which pulls you deep into sombre yet powerful feeling of the forests spirit & heart.
The second disc offers up another two epic half an hour plus tracks in the form of ‘Unveiled’ & ‘On This Fallen Star’. First up is ‘Unveiled’ which starts off in a dark ‘n’ dust country come American Indian like barren acoustic strums & the gravely male vocals. Later the track has moments of hazy beauty with clean & fresh layers of melodic guitar strums giving the feeling of running through a vast field of long wild grasses. ‘ On This Fallen Star’ returns to more slowed barren rock gone acoustic & dark earthy American folk tones as it slowly opens with deep acoustic pickings, before later become more forceful & up pace with duo of strummed acoustic guitars, nice barren windswept male & female harmonizing.
Certainly not an album for everyone because of the tracks lengths & their often barren or stripped tone; but if you enjoy primal, natural spirit lined music you should give this your time & effort to unwrap the the deep sombre beauty & emotion with-in these two discs.
CRUCIAL BLAST
The newest album to come to us from the always-amazing Glass Throat label (run by Chet Scott of Ruhr Hunter) is this double-disc set from Fearthainne, a quartet from the Cascadian wilderness that includes a couple of members of the black metal band Fauna, and who use a simple lineup of acoustic guitar, violin, drums, hammered dulcimer and vocals to create hypnotic doom folk hymns that are arranged as sprawling multi-part epics that tend to run for a half hour or longer. The band's name is taken from the Gaelic term meaning "to rain", which ties in with their general woodsy vibe, the lyrics and artwork all hinting at a collective yearning for the unspoiled natural world, of ancient forests and pagan ideals. Musically, it's pretty dark, and it begins with the shortest track here, an intro piece called "Awaken" that features swirls of murky earthen drones and resonant metallic shimmer created by Ruhr Hunter. Once that's over, though, the rest of the album is all acoustic, with simple, doom chord progressions strummed on the guitars, accompanied by simple drums and minimal strings and the singer's deep gravelly vocals. There's two discs, each with two to three massive multi-part tracks, for over two hours of haunting acoustic dirge, each song comprised of simple, repeating melodies and ominous chords, soft strains of dolorous violin wafting above, the deep male vocals sometimes joined by a female voice for a fragile harmony. The sound is similar to Steve Von Till's solo albums, or maybe even some of the Swans later forays into apocalyptic folk territory. Fearthainne's dark ecological laments and pagan themes definitely connect this to the GLass Throat aesthetic though, and fans of the other artists on the label (Ruhr Hunter, Elemental Chrysalis, Beneath The Lake, and especially the desolate doomed folk of Alethes) will no doubt be drawn to this epic collection of dark shamanic folk. Comes beautifully packaged in a thick six-panel oversized gatefold with full color photography and the two discs attached to the jacket on black rubber hubs..
AQUARIUS RECORDS
Much black metal has been coming out of Cascadia lately, Wolves In The Throne Room, Fauna, Echtra, but not all is grim and frosty and cold and buzzy and black in the Pacific Northwest. Fearthainne is the work of the two players who make up Fauna, whose Rain record we raved about a while back. But in Fearthainne, all of the buzz and bluster have been replaced by delicate crystalline guitar, gruff emotive vocals, deep ominous drones, all woven into a slow, drifting, meditative mountain folk. On the same label that in the past has brought us mysterious sounds from At The Head Of The Woods, The Elemental Chrysalis, Ruhr Hunter, Alethes and Beneath The Lake, Fearthainne sound right at home, blending dense whirring minimal soundscapes, with gentle meditative folk rituals. Long, long tracks that slowly blossom, smoldering, clouded in warm browns and cool greys, strings weep and moan, effects gently cradle the various elements, adding texture more than changing the sound. Mesmerizing, trancelike ruminations on nature, on death, on the beyond. Simple percussion demarcates sprawling folk strum and fields of lilting shimmer and delicate flutter. The vocals are a strange contrast, almost atonal, moaned more than sung, reminding us of solo records by either of the Neurosis frontmen, giving the proceedings a much more ominous vibe, ritualistic and hauntingly spiritual.
Gorgeous in its simplicity, mysterious in its minimalism, Fearthainne is the soundtrack to a land outside of time, of trees towering over a world unspoiled, clouds drifting across empty skies, night turning into day, the cycle of life continuing on, the world and the universe around it gradually moving into a new, more magical existence. Beautifully sublime. Incredible packaging, full color 6 panel oversized sleeve, amazing images of ancient forests, late night rituals, and the band gathered beneath a mighty tree, cradling a baby, dressed like witches, and looking like a band of bearded forest dwellers (which they may very well be!).
THE SHADOWS COMMENCE
It happens on special occasions that Glass Throat Recordings releases a new album, but every time it happens, with it, a new cosmos is born. One of the last albums to be released in 2008 was this, FEARTHAINNE’s debut. The band consists of members of the related Cascadian underground black metal act FAUNA (among others?) and the whole band can be seen on a super awesome picture on the back of the oversized, standard packaging for Glass Throat Recordings.
The first track, the intro that sets the mood, is composed and recorded by RUHR HUNTER, a project led by Chet W. Scott who runs the label. It’s great fun to hear some new material from him as well! Another name that pops up in the credits is Joshua Phillips, a name I trace back to the ALETHES album released in 2006, a great album that never got it’s deserved attention. The sound FEARTHAINNE presents is quite similar to how ALETHES sounded; it’s an acoustic and quite heavy folk and doom inspired experimentation, with never-ending melody lines and brooding vocals. Slightly more progressive and no Markus Wolff on drums this time though, but instead we get a wider instrumentation from a whole band; violins, dulcimers and further guitars are in the picture & that’s a good thing. The only problem with ALETHES was the lack of things happening.
Did I mention never-ending songs? Well, they are long but not really never-ending. The intro I told you about is three minutes short. Remaining tracks clock in at around 35 minutes each, making this album awfully long, two hours to be exact. Of course, it’s a double CD-release and yes... You get quite a lot of music for the price, if you decide to go pick this one up.
So, with long and brooding tracks, is this a monotonous album? Certainly, it takes both patience and time to get into. That’s the whole idea, this ain’t ought to be something you pick up whenever you feel like listening to some acoustics, this really craves from you to CONCENTRATE, REFLECT and FEEL, all the way from the beginning to the end. Monotonous, yes, but not in any way monoemotionous (I think I just made that word up, to get the right-nousnous swing at the end); we are thrown between sadness and hope, melancholia and depression, fear and self pity, lust and anger, and the contrasts between the many moods presented comes from the lyrics, a serpent soul and tempo alteration.
I just love this album! But I’ve only managed to get through it once, other attempts failed. I still feel it deep in my heart though, and I can’t wait till I can sit down and play it again, from start to end. If you’re into Glass Throat stuff, you know roughly what to expect. If you liked ALETHES you will fall for FEARTHAINNE. Others whom fancy TENHI, especially their pre-”Väre” era, should find this release to be of interest. I hope I’ve made you curious enough...Now go!
JUDAS KISS (By Simon Collins)
Timed to coincide with the winter solstice of 2008, this 16th release from the Seattle-based label Glass Throat Recordings is the debut album of Fearthainne, named after the Irish Gaelic verb meaning ‘to rain’. Fearthainne is a four-piece band, two of whose members also form the environmental black metal band Fauna, but out of deference to Fauna’s desire for anonymity, I won’t specify which ones.
Fearthainne’s music manifests itself in the form of four tracks, all half an hour long or even longer, spread over two CDs, with each one composed on a different pagan festival – Litha (summer solstice), Mabon (autumn equinox), Imbolc (1st February) and Ostara (spring equinox). The album opens, however, with a short overture entitled ‘Awaken’ by Ruhr Hunter, a blend of sonorous, vibrant gong tones, warm, embracing bass drones and the whispered word ‘awaken’, creating an atmosphere of expectancy and unveiling. After this intro, the remainder of the album is entirely acoustic, with instrumentation consisting only of guitars, drums, violin and hammered dulcimer.
‘Awaken’ segues straight into Fearthainne’s first track, the half-hour ‘Fauna’, which is dedicated to ‘the Moon Tribe’. A lonely acoustic guitar picks out a simple repeating melodic phrase, reinforced by a simple, muted drum beat and quiet, doleful violin as the phrase develops into a fragile melody. The guitar moves into strumming as the music gathers momentum, with the drum assuming greater pace and prominence. This music is radical in its simplicity, and ageless in its evocation of campfire community, like the best neo-folk. There’s also an obvious resemblance to the opening sections of Fauna’s one-hour black metal opus Rain. When songwriter and lead vocalist J. Joshua Phillips begins to sing, his voice is a low, gravelly rasp, similar to Steve Von Till or Ruhr Hunter’s Chet Scott, his lyrics suffused with nostalgia for a simpler, more holistic form of human co-existence with the natural world, simultaneously nostalgic for a tribal past and the joys of the hunt, and seeking to create a new tribalism founded in living on the land with deep ecological respect and awareness:
Birth throes of the old world
Giving us ourselves anew
The burning spark of life
Singing us home…
The gift of life itself
The deer has fallen so that we may live.
The song weaves a subtle woodland spell unhurriedly over its duration, with sparing embellishments of dulcimer and female backing vocals.
‘The Veil’ is even longer, stretching out over 39 minutes, and again opening with a single acoustic guitar. The vocals slide in unobtrusively, gentle and caressing, as chiming dulcimer keeps time with the strummed guitar, in the absence of drums, the melody swelling into an exquisitely fragile, bittersweet lament with the return of the violin, suffused with that delicate balance between joy and heartbreak which is often found in mid-period Swans. The song subsides back into simple plucked guitar and low vocal croons, before picking up pace again for the closing section, of a lilting strummed melody, with the lyrics calling “the gods back to earth.” Occasional, surprising dissonant guitar notes inject a darker undercurrent without fundamentally disrupting the basic atmosphere, the song ending on with a mantric refrain of male and female harmony vocals over fast heartbeat drumming:
We are still alive.
The second disc’s two tracks are roughly equal in length, clocking in at 36 and 37 minutes respectively. ‘Unveiled’ opens with heavy, emphatic strumming and growling vocals, before moving into a plucked melody, with this greater degree of aggression reflected in the lyrics, which call for “unending war / To feed the land with the blood of man” in classic misanthropic black metal fashion. It’s a reminder of the black metal leanings which underpin Fearthainne’s folk music, and it’s possible to envisage how this song could be rearranged for a black metal rendition full of blastbeats and furious riffing, although nothing like that actually happens. Around the eight-minute mark, there’s a quiet passage of plucked guitar counterpoised with higher plucked notes which sound like banjo, but which I presume come from the dulcimer, as the sleeve makes no mention of banjo. Banjo, mandolin, and wooden flute would all be natural extensions of Fearthainne’s sonic palette, though. Perhaps because of the black metal undertones of ‘Unveiled’, this is my favourite part of the album.
Fearthainne’s epic inward journey concludes with ‘On This Fallen Star’, opening with plucked guitar and background violin, and slowly cohering into a strummed melody, with forceful chord changes which again easily translate into metal modalities. This song is much less verbal than the other three, containing only six lines of lyrics over its 37-minute duration. At the 14-minute mark, the song subsides back down to unaccompanied guitar, before picking up pace again after a couple of minutes, the dulcimer adding a steady rhythmic cadence. At 23 minutes, there are wordless, soulful harmony vocals, giving way to a section led by dulcimer, with ethereal female vocals floating over the top – this has a strong Eastern European folk music feel, recalling folk metal projects like Svarrogh and Drudkh. The song ends with a return to the plucked guitar of its opening and a final four-word refrain:
Honor must be found
With J. Joshua Phillips’ vocals sounding less rasped at this point, the vocal resemblance to the clear, low tones of the Swans’ Michael Gira becomes more marked.
The exceptional length of these songs aside, the Fearthainne album is in some respects much more conventionally musical than a lot of what gets released on the Glass Throat label. Compared to the primordial earth drones of Ruhr Hunter or the cosmic blissout of At The Head Of The Woods, Fearthainne’s minimalist acoustic folk makes a much closer approach to mainstream conceptions of what defines music. Yet Fearthainne’s aesthetic is rooted in a philosophy common to the other Glass Throat projects. Fearthainne are evidently very much part of the clannish eco-shamanic Cascadian music scene which has produced bands such as Ruhr Hunter, The Elemental Chrysalis, Blood Of The Black Owl, In Gowan Ring, Waldteufel and Wolves In The Throne Room, with all these bands sharing an interest in the natural environment and heathenism in its broadest sense, as a form of deep engagement with both nature and the human community, an authentic way of being which yearns for reconnection, aiming to repair the rift between humanity and the world it inhabits.
With songs this long and stripped down, it’s easy to become impatient or to find your attention wandering, especially if you’re habituated to the attention-deficit entertainments and glittering distractions of our online epoch, but surrender to Fearthainne’s simple earthbound enchantments, and you’ll find that this music offers fellowship, healing and, ultimately, redemption:
The skin of our soul will mend again
When we thrust our arms into the soil.
The rain that Fearthainne are drawing down is both cleansing and transformative, washing away the pollution and detritus of the discredited and bankrupt old order whilst nourishing the first green shoots of a new Arcadia. Grey turns to green.
The Fearthainne album is presented in one of the oversized gatefold sleeves which are typical of Glass Throat releases, and which I love even though they don’t fit on my CD shelves. Sometimes exceptions must be made. The sleeve has photos of mossy, verdant Cascadian rain forests, a strangely beautiful shot of the interior of an eviscerated carcass (“The deer has fallen so that we may live”), a firelit ritual gathering, and a photo of the band which is like a cross between the famous cover shot of The Incredible String Band’s album The Hangman’s Beautiful Daughter album and Grizzly Adams, with some serious backwoodsman beard cultivation in evidence. Reviews of Fauna, Alethes and Sacrificial Totem can all be found elsewhere on Judas Kiss.
