WOLFMANGLER - Dwelling In A Dead Raven For The Glory Of Crucified Wolves
WOLFMANGLER album consisting of recordings from early 2005. Released by Aurora Borealis on CD and double LP. The lineup was: D. Smolken (bass, umber hulk), the rev. C.L. Umper (electric bass, water nymph), K. Elgethun (electric bass, drum, floating eye), T. Zephyr (flute, leprechaun), L. Dev (bassoon, tengu) and G. Elro (trombone, trapper).

CD track listing:
Dirge For A Viking Asshole
The First Elegy
The Death Of Geryon
Rise Up, Warriors
Words
Star-Winds

LP track listing:
Dirge For A Viking Asshole
The First Elegy
The Death Of Geryon
Rise Up, Warriors
Words
Star-Winds
King Guthrum
Herbst

Reviews

Address Drudion
July 2006
Author: Julian Cope
No no no, what you really gots to hear is the new WolfMANGLER, me dears. Released on the consistently great Aurora Borealis label, this stunningly-titled album DWELLING IN A DEAD RAVEN FOR THE GLORY OF CRUCIFIED WOLVES is as original as our blessed Teeth Of Lions Rule The Divine, Waldteufel or Khanate, and is truly the sound of the re-heathenised north. Wolfmangler, I salute ye. Imagine if THE WICKER MAN had not been an absolute pile of Christian-informed what-your-auntie-thinks-pagans-do sub-sub-Hammer Horror, and had, instead, been visionary enough to allow us all to have glimpsed an imagined lifestyle of heathens on some remote northern isle. Well, Wolfmangler is that soundtrack. If a doom heavy metal band played the music of the Padstow Obby ‘Oss, we’d be somewhere close. If Martin Walkier of Sabbat made an album with a colliery brass band, we’d be somewhere close. With their bassoon, trombone and drums at the forefront, Wolfmangler’s heady ritual drawl is the best I’ve heard since the aforementioned Teeth of Lions, Waldteufel and Khanate. Genius or watt.

Left Hand Path
October 31, 2006
Author: Stewart Voegtlin
The return. This time Wolfmangler comes bearing a trio of basses, electric and acoustic, flute, bassoon, trombone, drum and vocals. Hunting music: Stalking tones and crouching bass therein. A drum beats the strong hearts fighting freeze sequestered to the tree stand. Flute steadies in the crunching of twigs and limbs and leaves wet and sloppy stuck together in a confusion of browns and yellows and searing reds loose and slick like a bloody stool smeared over a hearty spine of emerald moss. Bolts are drawn and released; the elk is dropped and heaves, his breath broken and deep; clouds of it breaking from his nostrils in farts of ghost white. The fat black blade draws into its warm cavity and pulls free—a medusa head of flaccid intestines; the stench of viscera caught in the hunter’s nose like claws. Hands covered in a river run of sticky hot blood. A victorious voice growls and cackles over lowing bass, careful footsteps that return to camp for fire and warm wine. Fires soar in unrepentant winds, crisp orange sparks that dance in the night. Once extinguished the only protection from the ice—bodies foully tangled within the cones of stretched skin tents, their loins soaked in thick sour smut. Early morning brings the star winds and shared ritual; the bones of elk and boar ground down to talc and worn as a tunic. A grey white dress like birdshit hardened in the steady Winter sun. “I live in the back of the woods, you see; a woman and the kids and the dogs and me.”

Evening Of Light
Rating: 7/10
Author: O.S.
Wolfmangler is a side project of experimental folk artist D. Smolken, who is best known for his extensive work as Dead Raven Choir. Whereas the DRC explores both eerie folk soundscapes and harsh black metal, both mostly set to existing poems and songs, Wolfmangler focuses on a sound that lies somewhere in the desolate reaches between dark folk and funeral doom metal. Needless to say, this makes for quite an original sound, but also one that is rather a challenge to pull off convincingly. Nevertheless, D. Smolken succeeds in doing so.
The debut release by Wolfmangler was My Guitar Wants To Kill Your Wolves, released on Brad Rose's Foxglove records in 2004, and that one featured more of an explicit dronish doom metal sound through the use of electric guitar here and there. Not so on Dwelling in a Dead Raven..., where almost everything is acoustic. With spoken vocals, bass, drums (read: timpani), flute and a brass section, Wolfmangler manages to put down a sound that is dark, organic and so heavy that it would put many a modern doom metal band to shame.
The album starts off with "Dirge for a Viking Asshole", which is based on "Ĺse's Death" from the "Peer Gynt Suite" by Edvard Grieg. This song sets the tone for the rest of the album, which is dark, plodding, and overlaid with simple but engrossing melodies. Highlight of the album is "The First Elegy", which with its heavy timpani work reminds me of the more intense moments of Until Death Overtakes Me. Actually, a pretty good description of this album would be that it is an acoustic version of that particular brand of funeral doom metal. The album isn't convincing in all of its aspects, though. Here and there things get a tad too monotonous for my taste, and the vocals are too far away in the mix. As there are no lyrics presented in the booklet, it would have been nice to be better able to follow what Smolken is rambling about, as it is sure to be enhancing to the atmosphere.
So, despite some lesser points, this is a highly consistent release that will appeal to the more broadly-interested lovers of both doom metal and experimental folk. The Wolfmangler sound is a backdrop that allows for a wide range of gloomy interpretations, as can be surmised from other reviews of this album on the internet.

Surreal Documents
October 15, 2006
Wolfmangler: a drone like a fallen tree, rotting in a primeval forest in a wet autumn, so thick and mushy one can almost see mushrooms growing on it...
Wolfmangler: a drone so heavy and slow it makes one drowsy, like polish plum brandy burning it's way through one veins and brain; a drone so slow it's decomposing, like a procession of mad lepers...
Wolfmangler: a blackened improvised doom metal drone of double bass, two electric basses, flute, bassoon, trombone and the unintelligible mumbling of texts by Frank Sinatra, HP Lovecraft and Tyrtaeus; the sinister drone of a Pole called Smolken, of 'Dead Raven Choir' and 'Garlic Yarg' notoriety; a drone which sounds as if a Current 93 goose has been force fed a diet of slower, much slower Bathory, Burzum and Darkthrone to fatten it's liver until it is black and poisonous and unfit for consumption...
Dwelling in a dead raven...: Mayhem's Dead kept a rotting raven in a plastic bag to "inhale the scent of death" before going on stage, and this music is like that smell, as if it was music made for smelling rather than for hearing, for groping one's way through a dead raven as large as a concert hall, a morbid maze for the glory of crucified wolves, fascinans ad tremendum...
...for the glory of crucified wolves: to attain the grade of Magus, Aleister Crowley captured a toad, baptized it as Jesus of Nazareth, arrested it and charged it with blasphemy and sedition and then crucified it. It was Crowley's ritual for a Dying God; at the same time it caused the elemental spirit of the slain reptile to serve him. Where the toad was Crowley's blasphemous metaphor for Christ, the wolf is Smolken's; and the elemental spirits of slain wolves serve him. Magnificent.

Aquarius Records
August 18, 2006
The return of Wolfmangler, aka Smolken, who also just so happens to be the man behind Dead Raven Choir. Hot on the heels of a split with UK ultra doomlords Moss, Wolfmangler continue to explore the dark world of doom in their own truly peculiar manner. With bass, electric bass, drum, flute, trombone and bassoon (each band member is also credited with things like umber bulk, water nymph, floating eye, tengu, trapper and of course leprechaun) the Wolfmangler ensemble create a truly unique doom, woven together from wheezing woodwinds, throbbing low end, simple occasional drum beats and weird grumbled growly vocals. The result is not so much a massive doom sound as a creepy ancient court music, plodding and funereal. You can almost imagine some black clad procession trudging along the winding cobblestone streets within some walled fortress. Kerry though it sounded like punk rock slowed waaaaaaaaaaaaaaay down.
Texturally it's unlike anything we've ever heard. The closest reference might be Skepticism, the way it sounded like their music is being heard through the floor or from a building next door. Wolfmangler's sound has a similar timbre, a bit like some high school marching band dipped in tar and forced to march through a desert of black sand, or maybe like holding a stylus in one hand, and a scratched up 45 of Fleetwood Mac's tusk in the other, and trying to manually play the record by dragging the needle along each groove. Warbly and dizzyingly warped, Dwelling In A Dead Raven For The Glory Of Crucifed Wolves is some sort of hellish circus music, the soundtrack to a Fellini film, showed one frame at a time, a New Orleans Funeral Jazz band 78 played at 16 rpm on an old dusty victrola. So gorgeously slow, so pretty and creepy and dreamily doomy.

Plan B Magazine
Wolfmangler is another project from the Polish Moustache otherwise known as D Smolken, also of Garlic Yarg and Dead Raven Choir. The sludgefest follows the chamber doom quartet lineage of their previous releases, the bass/bass/double bass here being augmented by what sounds like a flute and maybe a French horn. And a big drum. The drum and flute give songs like "King Guthrum" an almost Korean court music feel, but the French horn pulls the soupy bass throb closer to Noggin The Nog territory. There's also a kind of Ray Harryhausen feel, something reminescent of the awakening of a plasticine dragon or the approach of clunkily animated skeletons holding swords, maybe one skelly has one of those spiky ball and chain thingies. If you could sonically render the effect of heavy rags being hypnotically stirred into a cauldron of molten pitch with a severed antler this is the sound you would get. All the while, Smolken hisses elegies, spits dirges and generally growls one off, rolling his R's like a proper movie baddy. Totally book.

Musique Machine
July 11th, 2006
Rating: 3/5
Author: Roger Batty
It's been a while since I've heard any Wolfmanger or Dead Raven Choir, which of course both manly consistence of the mysterious D. Smolken (along with a few other darkened souls), who seems to appear from time to time, from the undergrowth of a dark, sickly wood. Presenting the listener and record label with flesh dark musical meat, then becoming once more one with woodland.
Along the grim way of both his projects, he’s touched down in haphazard weathered folk, noise, stumbling almost life sucking sinister doom emissions and black metal. Here the mood almost wonders towards doomy,wrong sounding classical music, As this incarnation of Wolfmangler utilizes flute, bassoon and trombone and funeral precession like big drums. I must say it works to great effect, the songs shuffling along, in dower grace. Smolken is mumbling apocalyptic dread, barely heard under the thick soup of audio gloom. It conjures up all sorts of vision of decaying empires, the buildings ridden with black rot, the citizens mouthing words of help, with their tongueless mouths, as black bone steeds ride through, a million blade slashing and pulping their bodies.
Each track slips blackly into the next, the mood and pace never altering, making very, satisfying gloomy listening. The most bizarre track has to be Dirge For A Viking Asshole, which rebirths the riff from wild thing, into a world of gloomy, bassy ramblings and somehow makes it work.
A good a place as any to start investigate Smolken's strange and dark musical universe. You order direct from here and find out more about D. Smolken's ever growing unique and black discography here.

Heathen Harvest
July 15, 2008
Author: drengskap
Wolfmangler is a side project of D. Smolken, the luxuriantly-moustachioed Pole who’s probably best known for the experimental black metal of Dead Raven Choir, and the gloriously entitled Dwelling In A Dead Raven For The Glory Of Crucified Wolves (referred to hereafter as DIADRFTGOCW) is the full-length debut from the band, released in 2006 after a few CD-Rs and Protected By The Ejaculation Of Wolves, a limited-edition split album with the British doom-meisters Moss, which appeared in 2005.
The benighted realms of black and doom metal are home to some bizarre and twisted musical extremities, but bizarre doesn’t even begin to describe Wolfmangler’s unique sound. Largely acoustic and created from classical instrumentation including bowed double-bass, bassoon, trombone, flute and timpani (there are also limited contributions from two electric basses for added bottom-end chunder), Wolfmangler’s music is ponderously slow and preposterously menacing, in a pantomime villain kind of way – I'm sure that Smolken’s moustache gets twirled a lot. All the songs on DIADRFTGOCW were recorded live at Smolken’s residence in Texas, though ‘live’ is an odd term to use for something as malodorous, mouldy and decomposing as the low, groaning, rumbling, earthen dirge-rock of Wolfmangler. (Smolken has subsequently relocated back to Poland, presumably in a box of soil.)
The album opens with "Dirge For A Viking Asshole", which is based on Edvard Grieg’s Peer Gynt Suite and sounds like the aural equivalent of a funeral procession in an Edward Gorey cartoon, all murky gloom and spidery gothic flourishes. Smolken’s vocals are a throaty croak interred six feet under the absurdly bottom-heavy music – the album apparently uses texts taken from sources as diverse as the ancient Spartan poet Tyrtaeus, cult horror writer HP Lovecraft and Frank Sinatra, but no lyrics are given in the booklet, and without printed lyrics, you won’t get far with attempting to decipher Smolken’s cryptic garglings. With the big drum keeping time like the slavedriver on a Roman galley, one lengthy song after another shambles into the light at the pace of an especially slow and inefficient pack of zombies making a half-hearted attempt to eat your brains. You can practically smell the feculent stench of decay emitted by these warped and crumbling chords, a mixture of marsh-gas, bitumen, fermenting shellfish and fungal toe-jam, secreted from some unsavoury lupine territory-marking gland.
There are certain bands whose sound has elements in common with Wolfmangler. Alethes, whose sole recording to date has been Alethia, released on Glass Throat Recordings in 2002, share Wolfmangler’s acoustic doom propensities and atmosphere of organic decay. The Alethes album features percussion work by Markus Wolff, also of Blood Axis and Waldteufel, and a former member of Crash Worship, and the music of Waldteufel also tends to be slow, deep and bassy. (Markus Wolff, incidentally, also has a big moustache – hmmm, is there some kind of cause-and-effect relationship at work here?) The Austrian band Cadaverous Condition and the Belgians Silvester Anfang both produce music which can be described as ‘funeral folk’, and Silvester Anfang have also released material on the Aurora Borealis label, thus strengthening the family resemblance. The Southern Lord stable of drone bands such as Sunn0))), Boris and Earth share Wolfmangler’s gnosis of the supremacy of slowness. Ultimately, though, nothing can prepare you for Wolfmangler, and I'd suggest that you take a listen to one or two of the mp3 excerpts from DIADRFTGOCW available on both the Aurora Borealis and Dead Raven Choir websites, since something this wildly idiosyncratic is never going to fit neatly into formulaic, genre-bound expectations. And should you so happen to acquire a taste for the undeniably odd yet strangely compelling effusions of Wolfmangler, a new album, Cooking With Wolves, was released last year. There’s also a double vinyl version of Dwelling In A Dead Raven… available, which includes two extra tracks.