Ashaena appeared in June 2006, at the beginning as Cosmin’s solo project and then the other members being co-opted.
The first rehearsals took place after one year, and at the end of August 2007, Ashaena had its first concert in Galaţi in a formula including violin, too. Concerts followed then in Baia Mare and Iasi but without a violinist. Ashaena has always tried to catch a sound as close as possible to folklore.
Ashaena performs a Moldavian pagan metal with a lot of influences belonging to the native, Romanian mythology.
In February 2008, Ashaena entered the Negură Music Studio to record its first official material. It is to be called “Cei Născuţi din Pământ – The Ones Born from the Soil” and contains 9 tracks separated by 9 interludes called “vămi – borders”, as in Vămile Văzduhului – Borders of the Air. The album has been released by EastSide Records, a Polish Label. The album is already available to the public by this autumn 2009.
Ashaena has nothing to do with any NSBM organization or ideology. Ashaena is just paying a tribute to their ancestors and their traditions and culture. We are combining our musical paths with folk elements taken from our rich tradition. Regarding the Polish label EastSide we were signed with, this is only a deal for producing our first album and we are getting along very well because they are promoting pagan and folk oriented bands. Again, we have nothing to do with any NSBM affiliation that this label has.
By its music, Ashaena seek for honoring and thanking to the ancestors, promoting the Romanian traditions and to keep alive those having breathed their last for this land.
The band is currently working on their second album scheduled to be released on Loud Rage Music this Summer of 2016.
Statement:
We sing for all those feeling as sprung from this homeland. We value the Romanian traditions, folklore and mythology and seek to make them known both by our lyrics and also by the sonorities of our music. We must be proud of our ancestors and history. We have been living an acute national identity crisis manifesting itself on the background of a cultural crisis.
More and more young people have been embracing imported pseudo-values neglecting, ignoring or simply failing to know about the existence of some specific national values, genuine national values, archaic mythic-folkloric symbols, even pre-Christian ones. Christianity made nothing else than put a new cloth on the old religious symbols and conceptions of the people belonging to these places. The faith in Zalmolxis was somehow similar to Christianity and that is why this religion was easily and fast assimilated, without bloodshed and slaughter. Unfortunately, it was eventually assimilated, starting then to pervert the old symbols of the Dacian mythology and label them as being “evil”, “belonging to the devil”. There would be many examples to show but this is not an ethnological essay.
We fight against the false traditions! This is the very core of our ideology. We fight for knowing and promoting autochthonous mythic-folkloric symbols. We completely deny any Arian, racist, Nazi conception or any other extremist ideologies. We do not deny we are nationalist and love our motherland but we do not hang on certain symbols used for propagandistic purposes by other ideological currents. We belong to here, offspring of our ancestors. We are their hope across centuries and try not to disappoint them. They fed the soil with their own bodies so that we may be here now. They gave us horizon and name.
We are a people of stone imbued with blood. As long as the people do love their country and traditions and are not led intellectually by quotations taken over from the works of some people not even having been Romanian, as long as the Romanian youth showed a greater interest in studying the autochthonous personalities rather than those from abroad, in order to create for themselves personal symbols worthy to be followed, as long as all you feel for this land is springing from your very soul and is not the fruit of a sick snobbism, we can still pretend to have the hope to be worthy of our ancestors’ oath.
For the possible askers, Ashaena was one of the first names of the Black Sea. In the Scythian language, this word (Ashaena) used to mean dark blue.
“The Greeks, during their first wanderings, called it Axeinos (the inhospitable one), maybe trying in such a way a phonetic equivalence from the Scythian language into the Greek. Or, maybe, due to the storms which terribly shook and jolted them. But it seemed not to have shaken them terribly enough since they founded on its shores real (fortified or not) towns and trading warehouses. Shortly after it, the Sea received the name Pontus Euxinus, the Hospitable Sea.” (Vasile Parvan – “Dacica”)
As the sea water give forms as beautiful and well-shaped as they may be to the stones, rocks, by gracefully polishing them, the same we try by means of our music to polish the people’s souls, to induce homeland love into them, to make them consider the traditions and everything is specific to us as a nation.
Ashaena is that mystery, that desire and inner feeling which feel our soul. It is that fluid which gives us the strength and vigor to hold our head high and love our ancestors abode.
Line-up:
Cosmin “Hultanu” Duduc (rhythm guitar, voice, tulnic, pipe, long shepherd’s pipe)
Alex “Moş Strechia” Duduc (drums, flutes, long sheperd’spipe)
Alex “Vrancu” Vranceanu (guitar, vocals)
Marius Gabrian (bass)
Discography:
Cei născuți din pământ (Demo – 2006)
Cei născuți din pământ (Full-length – 2009)
Calea (EP – 2013)
Contacts:
Facebook page: www.facebook.com/Ashaena
Reverbnation page: www.reverbnation.com/ashaena
Bandcamp: http://ashaena.bandcamp.com
Email: ashaena@gmail.com