Artist description Barbaric outsider folk music. Nothing smooth or gentle, just dramatic vocals, blasts of dissonance and occasional distortion.

Music Style Barbaric outsider folk

Musical Influences Eastern and Northern European folk musics, Eastern European cabaret music, Japanese psych-folk, heavy psych, Jandek, Arnold Schoenberg's Harmonielehre etc.

Similar Artists Piwnica Pod Baranami, Keiji Haino, Kazuki Tomokawa, Kan Mikami, Ildjarn, Les Rallizes Denudes, Darkthrone, Graveland, Cindytalk

Artist History The digger Smolken was born and raised in Cracow, Poland, where he absorbed peasant folk music, overly theatrical 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 in high school, which is perhaps an embarrassing fact he should keep to himself, but that early exposure to chromaticism caused him to develop in an interest in music theory and advanced harmony. He later dabbled in mediocre noise and miserably failed improv, and eventually formed Dead Raven Choir. The original incarnation of Dead Raven Choir was a noise/satire/metal duo consisting of a mysterious stripper and Smolken. Only one song was half-finished before the stripper vanished. The name was exhumed in 1998 by Smolken and a different mysterious woman; this phase of dead raven music was a more serious attempt at making psych-ambient music with chromatic guitar harmonies and the poetry of A.A. Milne (best known as the author of Winnie-the-Pooh). Since then, several other poets have been subjected to the dead raven treatment and the dead raven sound has become increasingly acoustic and raw. Meanwhile, mysterious women came and went until Smolken was left to his own devices in 2000. After a few years of evolving in intentional obscurity, the dead raven sound finished its transformation to a grim and vicious form of acoustic folk. Having deemed his music releasable in 2001, Smolken swiftly spewed a horde CD-R releases on the DarkBlack MusikProduktion, Last Visible Dog, Death Aesthetic, Cat Sun Release and Jewelled Antler labels, with more on the way.

Group Members Smolken and occasional mysterious others: Hermia Debussy, Feral Farnsworth, Matt Rosin, Damien Hellfiend, Glenn Donaldson.

Instruments string bass, guitar, tenor banjo, mandocello, mandolin, organ, piano etc.

Albums Forest And Bear; Forest, The Forest; The Horny-Goloch Is An Awesome Beast Soople And Scaly It Has Twa Horns And A Hantle O' Feet And A Forky Tailie; Eaten By Wolves; The Dark Grows Blacker; Consider the birds of the air...; In All Poems There Are Wolves; Sheath And Knife EP; ...But Inside They Are Ravening Wolves; Sky Of Rose And Wolves; Grand Ravishing Extravaganza EP; split with Timothy the Revelator and Furisubi; The Blood Of Two Wolves; Armoured Wolves; Sleep Well, Red Wolves; Dwelling In A Winter Goat Towards Northern Wolves; A Tree Inside The Wolves

Press Reviews Dead Angel #52: Talk about enigmatic -- Dead Raven Choir is a one-man pagan-goth-something band based in College Station, Tejas, not exactly a hotbed of such activity to my knowledge... and he was booted out of Poland for political reasons and somehow wound up in Tejas. Apparently he was originally into death metal, not that you'd guess it here -- this is more like the pagan folk-worship of Current 93 and likeminded World Serpent bands, a folksy but sinister sound indeed. Smolken (he that is DRC) refers to what he does as "an intense and barbaric form of psych-folk," and who am i to disagree? It's certainly compelling enough in its otherworldliness, like music calling back to the medieval age. The pace is generally funereal, the mood one of melancholy, and it sounds nothing like anything "modern." These are pagan hymns for a lost time. Titles like "Hound-Voice," "The Black Tower," "The Withering of the Boughs," and "The Prophet Lost in the Hills At Evening" give an indication of where his head is -- off in the distance, in solitary contemplation of nature. I could imagine this being made by some fiendish black-metal warrior in a more contemplative mood as a side-project. This would probably hold great appeal for the followers of World Serpent bands and paganism in general... Also see reviews in other issues of Dead Angel, Blastitude, Cold, Apostazja, Aural Innovations, Sonomu, Funeral Procession, Aversionline, Alarming Echo Beats, the Russian Gothic Project etc.

Location College Station, TX - USA

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