DEAD RAVEN CHOIR, WOLFMANGLER and GARLIC YARG history

DEAD RAVEN CHOIR, WOLFMANGLER, GARLIC YARG and possibly also TAINT MEAT are the various bands of one D. Smolken. DEAD RAVEN CHOIR and WOLFMANGLER are currently active.

DEAD RAVEN CHOIR is a horrid blight upon black metal and does great damage to credible black metal artists everywhere. Or perhaps it's keeping black metal alive and interesting. DEAD RAVEN CHOIR doesn't care which it is, just plays black metal covers of country and folk songs. The sound is much rawer, louder and harsher than tradition would dictate. The instrumentation is built around bowed bass fiddle, distorted bass guitar, drums and screams.

In its earlier incarnation DEAD RAVEN CHOIR was a creepy barbaric folk project with occasional outbursts of exceedingly harsh black metal. It was originally formed in 1996 as a duo consisting of Smolken and a mysterious woman. The idea was to play virulent black metal with lyrics taken from "Winnie-the-Pooh". Fortunately this resulted in only one half-finished song before the mysterious woman disappeared. In 1998 Smolken and another mysterious woman set more A.A. Milne poems to quieter, more restrained music. DEAD RAVEN CHOIR evolved from that point, growing increasingly more raw and dramatic. In August 2004 after two CD releases and over twenty CD-Rs Smolken abruptly ended all dead raven activity. 2006 brought the rebirth of DEAD RAVEN CHOIR in an even grimmer form resulting in the My Firstborn Will Surely Be Blind album. A new album consisting entirely of black metal covers of country songs has been recorded for a 2008 release.

WOLFMANGLER's music is slow, grim, noisy and shambling doom metal constructed around a bowed double bass, distorted electric bass guitar and whatever other instruments are available. Though Smolken wrote some of the early material, the band's reportoire these days consists of covers of folk songs, classical music pieces and jazz standards.

WOLFMANGLER recorded some material in Texas in 2004-2005 with ever-changing lineups. This led to a few CD-R releases, a split CD with MOSS and the Dwelling In A Dead Raven For The Glory Of Crucified Wolves full-length. The band was reborn in Poland in 2007 and released the Cooking With Wolves album.

GARLIC YARG was a 2004 project which recorded four albums of primitive improvised music released on CD-Rs. Its members moved on to WOLFMANGLER.

Then there may or may not also have been something called TAINT MEAT.

Smolken was born and raised in Cracow, Poland, where he absorbed peasant folk music, cabaret music and underground anti-Communist sung poetry. His family was asked to leave the country for political reasons in 1986, and he eventually ended up in Texas. He played death metal, dabbled in mediocre noise and miserably failed improv, and eventually formed DEAD RAVEN CHOIR in 1996. What the future holds remains to be seen.