FROM THE PRESS RELEASE:

Florian-Ayala Fauna is a Buffalo, New York-based trans-femme, intersex interdisciplinary artist who knows something about productive darkness and antagonizing binaries, and who shies away from neither the sublime nor the terrifying. Her latest full-length under the name Uncertain, The Descending Spirals of Time, is a sonically and emotionally deep exploration of magic and pain.

Coil’s Jhonn Balance once spoke in an interview about the cumulative loss of magic that he saw as resulting from the gradual diminishing of darkness in the world. “I think that electric lighting,” he says, “has destroyed a whole area of mythology and magic making.” In times now long past for most cultures, Balance asserts, “when the sun set, it was dark, and people had candles, maybe, or fires, and stories were told and stories were made up and people imagined. Now, they don’t. It is a terrible schism, or break, a fracture, this destruction of this whole area of human imagining and belief, creating.”

If the new full-length from Uncertain is any indication, Florian-Ayala Fauna understands exactly what Balance is getting at, and it is perhaps no coincidence that The Descending Spirals of Time shares something in common aesthetically with Coil and early Current 93. (Fauna in fact has collaborated with Coil member Stephen Thrower.) Of course this isn’t only about electric lighting, and if the world is operating at a kind of deficit of productive darkness, it may be through the work of people like Florian-Ayala Fauna that we can recover some of those lost shadows.

The first two tracks comprising side A are culled from an ongoing cycle of songs inspired by Fauna’s visions and “heavenly dreams,” in this case a vision of a family of fox-people undergoing a transcendental transfiguration as their earthly bodies dissolve. Transcendence through bodily transformation and physical mutability find sonic representation through blissful but feral eruptions and swells: collaged bells become thunderous rumbles become choruses of seraphic voices. Fans of Current 93’s Nature Unveiled or Cyclobe’s Sulphur-Tarot-Garden will find a lot to love in this work, and no less so with respect to side B, which is culled from an entirely different set of sounds. “Frail Child Dies Alone” and “Vulture Child of Disease and Extinction” deal not with the sublime shimmer of magical worlds, but the wretched realities of political terror and collapse. These tracks reference and represent, for example, the suffering of children at the hands of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, the fragility and strain of society’s bonds in the throes of a global pandemic, and the suffering caused by fascism’s various forms. Sonically, Uncertain does not evade the terror of these realities, but evokes that terror, reflecting and expressing Fauna’s sense of apocalyptic dread.

As a trans and intersex person, as a practitioner of esoteric magick, and as a person who experiences very real visions on account of temporal lobe epilepsy, Florian-Ayala Fauna, as Uncertain, pushes against various veils and borders, exploring and antagonizing tidy divisions between worlds, between identities. The assemblage and transformation of samples and field recordings into greater works parallels a kind of transfiguration of the body, while the resulting work itself exalts magick and repels fascist realities, emotionally and aesthetically conveying extreme experiences and conjuring catharsis.


Genres: post-industrial, experimental, avant-garde, noise, goth, ambient

RIYL: Current 93, Coil, Puce Mary, Cindytalk, Cyclobe, Ramleh, Pain Chain, Drekka, Genital Shame, Pharmakon, Throbbing Gristle

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