The Blood Of Two Wolves
CD-R released by DarkBlack MusikProduktion, now out of print. Settings of Georg Trakl poems improvised by Smolken and Matt Rosin, and a Taint Meat cover.

On A Journey
Helian
The Song Of The Recluse
Passion
Psalm I
The Thunderstorm
The Song Of The Western World
Elis
Sevenfold Song Of Death
Having Grits Tonight

Reviews

Dead Angel
Author: Pym imitating RKF
September 2002
I just realized who the Dead Raven Choir sound like: they sound like a roomful of Jandeks, assuming Jandek was really big on the pagan folk tip. This is a mysterious-sounding album, just like most everything i've heard so far from head raven Smolken. The sound is one of two Shakespearean bards with li'l mandolins and piano and the like sitting around a living room playing as a storm brews in the background -- very homespun (this is definitely not a hi-fi production, although it's clear enough to tell what's going on, and the rest is just window dressing, right?), but in these hands, very dramatic and effective. There are ten movements, and while i have no idea what the hell they're saying, it sounds like something that would qualify for a more recent version of the FOLKWAYS records. I really like the way the storm outside, which comes and goes throughout the disc as the band plays, actually enhances the whole sound and feel. If the recently-departed Alan Lomax were still around and taking his tape recorder to the hills to record the obscure and otherworldly sounds of the real country and folk musicians, this is the kind of sound he'd be capturing. Griel Marcus would shit his pants over this. Outsider country -- o yeah. It's time is coming, yes it is....

Aversionline
August 2002
3/10
Here's another slight change of pace for Dead Raven Choir. 10 tracks, over 43 minutes, almost entirely improvised, and all recorded in mono over the course of one night. Thus combining the rawness of their early "Sheath and Knife" CD (sans any black metal) with the quirky dark experimental folk of the recent "Sky of Rose and Wolves". The songs are much longer here, averaging between three and five minutes (some more, some less), and the compositions are much more impulsive and jagged… thus the improvisational nature of the material shows through. The vocals are in the same dramatic style, a mix of part narrative, part singing, but they're somehow more tolerable with this outing due to the recording. Not only are the vocals quieter, but they're not as bright as the stringed instruments, and the natural delay sounds pretty good. I still don't like the delivery of the vocals, but it works better here. Unfortunately the songs suffer from redundancy. Many of the tracks sound almost identical to one another for the most part (lots of random strumming to varying degrees of volume with some note-based riffs and lots of fairly obnoxious bends), so I would say that improvising isn't a strong point for the group. I don't mind the sound, though. Despite being recorded in mono it sounds fine, and were these songs fully composed I think this approach would work. The CD-R is again packaged in a slim jewel case with one insert. The art was printed from a home computer, but it looks fine. The cover image is an excerpt from a painting (a snake coiled near a woman's breasts), but the presentation isn't that eye-catching. So, once again, I think this is a really curious project, but I can't get into it at this point. I will say that what they do has caught my attention and peaked an interest, I only hope that at some point they'll put something together that blows me away. I know they're capable of it.

Maelstrom
Author: Roberto
October 2002
We got a bunch of CDR albums by Dead Raven Choir, a largely one-man, dark folk project, and it's pretty weird. It's so almost inexplicably strange that I hesitate to call it bad outright.
Take The Blood of Two Wolves as an example. This record is performed by two guys, one who plays guitar and one who does vocals. The vocals are all spoken in what I suspect is at least an exaggerated (if not totally put on) Eastern European accent - the guy likes to roll his Rs. The music itself is totally improvised. It seems that most of the time the vocalist is leading the guitarist, but the response time is kind of staggered. This means you'll get lots of parts where the vocalist decides he wants to get dramatic or dark or quiet or sinister, and the guitarist will get the idea a few moments later and launch into something he feels suits the mood. The attempts at dynamics seem totally random, almost as if the two guys sat down and made a checklist for each song, that each track had to feature at least one anxious part, one sulking part, one indifferent part, one reflective part, etc… and the vocalist is going down the list crossing the requisites off.
I'm confused at to what the intention of this album is considering its baffling values. You would think that The Blood of Two Wolves was intended as a pedestal to present some dark poetry, but as that, it fails. This is because the vocals are so buried in the mix that you can only make out every 10th word or so. I had to put on headphones to be able to follow what was going on. Even if the vocals were properly audible, it seems that the lyrics were written in as improvised a manner as the music, or spouted out from some dark folk lyric generator machine that has for a vocabulary 1,000 dark words that it arranges randomly.
The improvised music itself follows in the same pattern as the variety of the vocals. It's all random plinks and warbles with little strums here and there. Is this the result of two guys who really have no idea what they're doing and have no talent whatsoever, or is it the result of two lunatics without that much musical talent to speak of, but whose music that could be called bafflingly bad will incite morbid curiosity in some listeners? I'll leave it up to you. On to the next Dead Raven Choir review…