Their Feet Are The Foraging Ground Of Wolves
Volume 5 of the Jewelled Antler Library series of 3" CD-Rs. Three settings of Paul Verlaine poems in English translation. This is the quietest and slowest dead raven material to date. This release is out of print, but the entire series is going to be reissued as a 3 CD set.

Night Scene
The Horn's Sound In The Wood
The Shepherd's Hour

Reviews

Dead Angel
Author: RKF
July 2003
More grim foreboding from the DRC, this time via three glacial tracks on a 3-inch cd-r (which I gather is suddenly the hip new format or something) in a plastic sleeve with cryptic but lovely artwork of the woods and a wee insert with notes printed in microscopic type. This outing isn't quite as noisy as some of the earlier stuff, but on slow (and long) tracks like "night scene," "the horn's sound in the wood," and "the shepherd's hour," their approach can be a tad disorienting, with figures built on lengthy pauses that often make you think the song stopped until something happens again. Stuff like this makes me start to wonder if they aren't just the Melvins of the avant neo-folk world or something. Cool stuff, although I suspect most can't hang with the truly epoch-spanning sense of time happening here. King Buzzo would approve.

All Music Guide
Author: Thom Jurek
Rating: 4/5
Issued as Volume Five in the Jeweled Antler collective's 3" CD-Rom series, Their Feet Are The Foraging Ground of Wolves is the third release by Dead Raven Choir for the label in 2003 — and it's only May! Smolken, who is DRC, has taken three poems by the French poet Paul Verlaine as is his starting point for this almost unbearably creepy and beautiful trip to the outer edges of modern acoustic music. Here are the sounds of lilting guitar and hunted piano slipping through the ether of time and space to present music from another present era, one in which men, spirits, animals, and sounds were inseparable and came form the same ooze of atmospheric grace. Of all the DRC releases so far, this one is easily the most plodding, purposeful, tortoise-like in pace, and spare in production. Two-string chords are plucked in a barely-there pulsing fashion on "Night Scene," before giving way to empty space 45 seconds in, and only then does Smolken's vocal enter hesitantly, as if to accent every stark space in Verlaine's "lyric." The mood is more forlorn but somehow lighter on "The Horn's Sound in the Wood...," where brief swirling chords alternate with single and double note backdrops for the slowly revealed verse. Finally, on "The Shepard's Hour," a dissonant piano enters into the foreground as Smolken intones in response to its chord-like strictures that are airless and tense, yet so still they are like black crystal, brittle and beautiful. Ultimately this is one of the strongest and most moving of the DRC releases, but give him time; it seems like Smolken's aesthetic is just being formed.

Aquarius Records
May 30, 2003
The missing number 5 in the Jewelled Antler Library series of 3" cds turns out to be by Dead Raven Choir, the Texas-by-way-of-Poland based folk/improv one man project that the Jewelled Antler powers-that-be seem to be totally in love with of late -- this is their 3rd DRC release this year! As with his previous Jewelled Antler cd-rs, DRC here conjures up some eccentric vocal theatrics and sparse, haunted acoustic guitar playing, like some sort of Eastern European Jandek. And his black metal obsession with wolves continues in the title here as well. Scarily beautiful, with atmospheric piano and unknown other sounds providing a hissing soundscape for his vocal, all three tracks here featuring macabre poetry by Paul Verlaine.