Wine, Women And Wolves
Album released on CD by Last Visible Dog. This is the first dead raven disc in a format other than CD-R. Settings of poems by Charles Baudelaire, Hilaire Belloc, Rainer Maria Rilke and A.A. Milne, two instrumentals, and a Taint Meat cover. Sevaral contributions by Glenn Donaldson.

The Eyes Of Beauty ~ a palace plundered by wolves
The Kings Of The World Are Growing Old.... ~ the sick crown
But Oh! Not Lovely Helen... ~ doom
The Swan ~ o water, when wilt thou come in rain?
The Island ~ where the slow waves thunder
Streets Of Laredo ~ the mercury was reeking
The Sadness Of The Moon ~ a furtive teardrop
The Owls ~ foreign gods
February ~ the sun is near the hill-tops
Beacons ~ Rubens, da Vinci, Rembrandt, Michaelangelo, Puget, Watteau, Goya, Delacroix
Christmas Meat ~ carrion
The Charcoal Burner ~ in the forest, alone in the forest
Piano Practice ~ impatience for a reality

Reviews

Heathen Harvest
January 1, 2007
Author: Lord Lycan
For a number of years now, Dead Raven Choir has been one of my favorite bands in the realm of black metal because of their sheer ability to be incredibly creepy without resorting to satanism or murder. Dead Raven Choir is masterminded by one man only: Smolken. He also plays an important part in the bands Goatbomb and Wolfmangler. Originally from Cracow, Poland, Smolken recently spent a great deal of time in Texas. However, he recently moved back to his mother country. In the band's 10 year existence, he has released no less than 30 albums under the Dead Raven Choir banner.
Dead Raven Choir is unique because the project tends to consistently go back and forth between raw black metal and neofolk ambient/Polish spoken word. This release, however, is in vain of the latter: Folk Ambient. So I will focus on these aspects. It really is almost like being inside the mind of a truly demented redneck. Throughout this release we are subjected to nothing but light Polish spoken word, with disharmonic strummed notes on banjo and acoustic guitars. If there was such a thing as Funeral Folk, this would be it. Slow, dreary, and absolutely insane. It's almost like we're inside the minds of killers from movies like Deliverance and The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. It's almost humorous at times to sit back and hear what he is saying. It's almost like a drunk Russian mumbling consistently about what he's given to this bitch that's left him while strumming on his guitar incoherently.
Perhaps that is truly what is going on during the recording process though? Who knows. All I know is that it makes for an interesting experience for the listener, and is a truly unique recording. It is a shame, however, that the packaging was so minimal. It would have been nice to see artistic expression beyond the music from DRC. If you are into really strange music, this would be a good choice to make as far as a purchase. It's not nearly intolerable, and really is an enjoyable experience to sit back and listen to from a withdrawn perspective. Don't take it too seriously, and it's certainly worth your money. If you listen closely to the music, its not quite as random as it may seem. The music does have a progression to it that stays in key with its own off-key structure. It just may not be for everyone.

Worm Gear
August 30, 2004
Author: Scott
This is the third recording I have heard that Dead Raven Choir has either done or been a apart of and all of them are completely different. "Wine, Women And Wolves" is difficult to categorize. It incorporates brutishly played folk instruments and strings with text written by such visionaries as Ranier Maria Rilke and Charles Baudelaire among others. The music is very spacious and minimal, single notes ring out, slow melodies lumber in the background, and these elements provide the uncomfortable beauty that the record has. Then in addition to that , harshly strummed disharmonic chords grope out abruptly from the stillness giving it a primitive and aggressive side as well. The texts are delivered through softly spoken vocals or hissing whispers that grow more venomous at the record progresses. They are mixed well so that they don't over power the music being played. The tracks don't follow a sustained structure or melodic pattern, they are more like free form accompaniments, though I don't get the feeling that they are improvised. There is a deliberateness to the writing that tells me this mix of beauty and barbarism is precisely what was intended. "Wine, Women And Wolves" is a really unique record, I haven't heard anything quite like this before. It's got a visceral quality to it that I find really appealing and evocative, but I can also see how people wouldn't like this. So I guess that is the caveat. This is an interesting and curious release, but it's not for everyone.

Pitchfork Media
February 12, 2004
Author: Brandon Stousy
Rating: 7.4
Obsessed with wolves and the latent terror lurking behind silences, Dead Raven Choir honorably represent the raw black metal wing of San Francisco's Jewelled Antler Collective. Eking out an acoustic Melvins dust-storm force-fed Metal Machine Music, Smolken, a Polish exile named for the grave digger in Corman's The Undead, inhabits the wilds of Texas, masterminding miasmatic atmospherics that initiate buried-alive claustrophobia as well as the beauty of a backlit spider-web. Accompanied here by Birdtree/Thuja/Blithe Sons favorite son Glenn Donaldson on splintered acoustic guitar and sundry stringed things, our dark-blooded hero whispers and rages from Rilke and A.A. Milne to Baudelaire and Hilaire Belloc and back. More Paris Spleen than Pooh Corner, when Smolken steps to the mic (which I imagine dangling just-so from a cragged tree branch), he conjures the lonesomest strains of folk, cabaret, and sung poetry.
His treatment of the poems can be mesmerizing. In some cases, accents are placed at odd or unforeseen moments, while others are read audio-book straight. His dusky rendition of Rainer Maria Rilke's "The Kings of the World are Growing Old", for example, follows the original text word-for-word, albeit with a strange, lupine hiss in the background. Others are twisted around with brambles (unless he's using cut-up translations I haven't located). "Beacons ~ Rubens, Da Vinci, Rembrandt, Michaelangelo, Puget, Watteau, Delacroix" offers an elliptical take on the last three stanzas of Baudelaire's "Beacons". Smolken doubles his voice, initiating his own call-and-response between clipped fanaticism and drawn-out, dry throated whispers. His high-flung subject: "These, Oh Lord, are the benedictions. The tears, the ecstasies, the blasphemies, the cries of 'Te Deum.'"
With Smolken going off in the forefront, Donaldson's left to his own devices. And though it isn't clear who plays what, the array of sounds are subtle and wonderfully textured. There's an upright bass, I think, as well mandolin, banjo, bells and percussion. Structurally, choruses are avoided and besides the acoustic punctuation marks that jump from nowhere, there are zero build-ups: the endless skies above a plain, wisps of pale that hover inches above a cedar lake. It's all beautifully codified: One might have more background than another and perhaps another goes into different sorts of convulsions, but for the most, the pitch remains within the unplugged zone of bands like Badgerlore or Darkthrone. If you're more interested in Dark Raven Choir's equally enjoyable noise strain, you'll need to look elsewhere (I recommend the upcoming 3" CDR, Sturmfuckinglieder, which features seismic, totally harsh covers of Leonard Cohen, Garnet Rogers, and Townes Van Zandt).
Though words prove essential, there are a couple instrumentals. A squeaky cover of "Streets of Laredo" whips up Woven Hand burning in a Gypsy fire with a lonesome, warping violin. "Piano Practice - Impatience for a Reality" is a protracted set of random, dramatic plucks and bowed strings wound large through gaps of dead space bottomed out with the minutest rattling of Morton Feldman's bones. (Anyone interested in creepy ambiance and/or the eccentric appropriation of found materials, do yourself a favor and mix this with Liars' upcoming witch-hunt, They Were Wrong, So We Drowned. Now get a walkman, wander the country at night, and have yourself a really fine Walpurgisnacht.)
For those familiar with Smolken, this new full-length won't surprise. What makes Wine, Women and Wolves special, beside the great title, is that it's the first non-CDR release aside from compilation appearances. Therefore, it ought to be easier to track down than, say, Eaten by Wolves, released in an edition of 7, or the equally out-of-print Lesbian Corpse Wolves, limited to a whopping 30 copies. For the new fans I should warn you now that most of Dead Raven Choir's extensive back catalogue-- 25+ releases since 1998-- is already out of print. With someone this productive, though, there's of course hope for the future. (As we go to print, there are four releases scheduled for 2004: Goating Shapelessness Theatrical Wolves, Death to Dead Wolves, Cooking with Wolves, and the anomalously non-wolf title, Dead Raven Choir and Never Presence Forever - Rozrywa Szwy Ciszy). And, hey, becoming a collector at this stage of the game seems an admirably obscurantist activity.
Wine, Women and Wolves isn't the most exciting of listens, and it won't get you out on the dance floor, but like a good horror film, the atmosphere's so finely intense, that even the most mundane creak of a door or a cat's innocent mew proves startling enough to make you scream like the feckless sissy you are, really.

Dead Angel
May 2004
Author: RKF
In some ways DRC is the Khanate of country death folk; Smolken and Glenn Donaldson may only be armed with acoustic instruments, but they sure like their folk so slow it's almost stationary. Prone to a noisy sort of deliberate primitivism, their albums tend to sound like someone placed a mike in the living room of two intensely morose country boys, possibly after a couple of swigs o' moonshine, trying to out-spook each other with instruments they found in the attic. Or perhaps they're just soundtracks to an endlessly bleak and desolate movie about wolves coming to eat the sheep. They stick to acoustic instruments and not-so-fi recording for that authentic sound, that sound you first heard on old, old albums with titles like "See That My Grave Is Kept Clean" and "Hellhound on My Trail" -- their sensibility is more epic and operatic, however, although they thankfully avoid the screeching diva thing. The kind of thing you should be listening to when you want to transport yourself to another world, one rooted in the rural sounds of the past, and the sound of outsides far beyond the imagination of modern society.

Blastitude
March 2004
Author: Larry Dolman
I've said it before: no one puts a still chill in the air quite like Dead Raven Choir. DRC (as their fans call 'em) are really a choir of one, a singer and songwriter named Smolken, who sings and plays some stringed instrument or another and maybe does some other stuff, but not much, because this is some really sparse and quiet music. Frozen-sounding, actually -- listening to it, I can't help but think of the way Nocturno Culto once sang, "COLD . . . . . . . . . . . . SO COLD . . . ."
On his albums Smolken is usually joined by one or at most two sparse guests; here it's Glenn Donaldson of the Jewelled Antler collective, which is a good choice, because G.D. barely adds anything at all, and what he does add (some wispy string pluckings here, a bone-dry cello line there) keeps it all very . . . chilly. The sum of all this creaking and whispering is a singular combination of psychedelic folk, old world cabaret, and the cold chill of black metal. I know some people kinda get turned off by the cabaret aspect -- a guy at work dismissed it with one word, "arty," and I can't say he's off the mark -- but I think it's a great album. When, towards the end of the album, after like 30 minutes of ominous advances and silences, Smolken builds up to hissing the phrase "Chrisssstttmmasss Meeaaat!," well, I know I've really gotten somewhere. Even if getting there was surprisingly quiet. Wine, Women & Wolves is the first Dead Raven Choir album to be on a format other than CDR, and it's deserving, as it feels like his magnum opus so far.

The Wire
Author: Edwin Pouncey
Dead Raven Choir sound here as witchy as New York cult rockers The Liars (also reviewed in this edition) wanna be. They mutter vocal incantations over a single strummed acoustic guitar chord, while someone else slowly bows a cello or chimes a bell. Heavily mysterious and minimalist, the DRC duo of Smolken and Glenn Donaldson offer up no explanation as to where they are coming from, but their music is as infused with elements of fractured folk, jazz and even a trace of Burzum-style Ambient Black Metal to make matters even more confusing and intriging. Drawing from such writers as Rainer Maria Rilke, Hilaire Belloc, Charles Baudelaire, AA Milne and Feral Farnsworth, 'Wine, Women And Wolves' is a complex and ultimately rewarding experience.

Aquarius Records
December 12, 2003
Another transmission from the Dead Raven Choir, the work of a Polish ex-patriate Texan who calls himself Smolken. Followers will understand when we say that this falls into the sparse, dramatic folk half of his ouvre, rather than on the black metal noise folk side of things. Whispered, accented vox deliver the poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke, Hilaire Beloc, Charles Baudelaire, A.A. Milne and others over doleful strings and abstractly strummed guitar. Smolken seems to be a creepy, well-read Eastern-European version of Jandek, and he's a master of atmosphere, going totally over the top with minimal means. Every note played, and every hiss between notes, turns the blood colder. If an album could sound cursed, this is it.
Fans will of course pick this up, but if you haven't yet delved into Smolken's haunted sound-world, perhaps this is the one to try. For one thing, it's the man's first 'proper' cd after many cd-rs and tapes. And one of his best album titles too! The clincher, perhaps, is that aside from Smolken himself, the only other musician to appear on this recording is our friend, Jewelled Antler stalwart Glenn Donaldson (Thuja, Blithe Sons, Birdtree, Skygreen Leopards, etc.). Ever since, he's had a hollow look in his eyes and his beard seems paler and wispier... Or so we imagine.

The Broken Face
No. 18
Author: Lee Jackson
If you haven't checked out the jagged Eastern Euro folk stylings of Smolken AKA Dead Raven Choir, now just might be the time. Wine, Women and Wolves is as good as anything I've heard from this rabid troubadour. Reference points are still the bleak winter, black metal, improv/noise, acid folk, Poland and maybe Jandek. Words like fractured, damaged and fucked up could also still be employed; Smolken isn't really doing something that anyone else dares to, or would want to for that matter. It's music that can be hard to take in large doses, an amalgam of sparse detuned folk clang and pure negative space, just like the harsh winds of the Siberian tundra, but there's something to Smolken's jagged austerity and whispered, multi-tracked vocals (reading words from the likes of Rilke, Baudelaire and Belloc here) that proves entrancing in the same way as a classic German Expressionist film or a Kafka short story. It's all rather disturbing, but genuinely avant-garde and even kind of beautiful too. Fans of Thuja and Jewelled Antler might want to note that Glenn Donaldson contributes throughout.

Weekly Dig
January 2004
Author: Rob Forman
This Polish expatriate living in Central Texas since the mid-80s has released some two-dozen titles all in CD-r micro editions. Initially a purveyor of harsh Black Metal, the primarily one-man band of "Digger" Smolken has settled into an all acoustic setting and now generates super sparse, old world folk music from the truly deep forest that is primarily monochromatic and very slow. This release is his first non CD-r release, ponied up by the mysterious Rhode Island label Last Visible Dog, which excels at uncovering arcane musical projects from all over the place, is laden with "did it myself" aesthetics. All of Smolken's texts (his name is nicked from the gravedigger in Corman's The Undead) are unsurprisingly dark themed poems from the likes of Belloc, Baudelaire and Milne. The avoidance of melody, lack of musical development within each piece, and the relatively monotone vocal delivery are positive aspects here, allowing the guitar (or banjo) chords to hit with fuller weight and act as a counterbalance to the vocals. While certainly Goth in many of its audible cues and all of its text and visual cues (this should certainly connect with Current 93 Empyrium-era acolytes), ultimately the Dead Raven Choir are a much more abstract affair, and rather elusive in the best sense.

Psyche Van Het Folk
April 2004
Author: Gerald Van Waes
A couple of disarming guitar chords, with Japanese like chords beatings, death lingers as an icy shadow, when a voice whispers.. an exhibit, dangerous to change one’s destiny.. is what I feel after the first couple of seconds of “the eyes of beauty”.
With words by Rainer Maria Rilke (like "The Kings Of The World Are Growing Old") , Hilaire Belloe, Charles Beaudelaire (like "The Owls" ), A.A.Milne, Feral Fansworth, there are many space intervals being part of the music, entangled with aggressive chords or tangling bowed strings, contemporary abstract and odd, with whispering words that often cry out from out of the silence like shouts, Dead Raven Choir shows show a dark theatre-like expression, more than just textures with words and poetry in music. “Beacons, Rubens, Da Vinci, Michelangelo, Puget, Watteau, Delacroix” by Baudelaire, is extra expressive with a second dubbed voice, working as a curse, which is, -although whispering too, and in a quiet mode-, obviously influenced by the metal scene. “Christmas Meat-carrion” by Feral Farnsworth has also mesmerizing / exorcising creaky dark aspects of human expressions. Last track concludes with an instrumental. A consistent release.

Psychotropic Zone
December 2003
Phew, this is a rather strange album. Originally Polish, but now living in Texas, a guy called Smolken has been able to get his first proper CD out. Prior to this, he has released over a dozen CD-R's. Almost every title of his products seems to be associated with the wolves, so he might be some kind of wolf freak... Smolken, who has Polish folk as influence, among other things, and death metal background, has a habit of lending texts from famous poets and writers, and then recite these with his unique accent. There has also been a female singer on some of the releases, for example. On this album, Smolken is joined by Glenn Donaldson, but I don't know what he's doing. This is quite theatrical stuff, and not very musical, I think. The narration, often in whispering, is accompanied by occasional sounding, sparse and non-rhythmical hits by different acoustic instruments. In this way, a rather dark atmosphere is created. Who likes it, well that's another issue. I doubt I'll listen to this very often, but I must admit that this has some kind of magic of its own.

Cold
Autor: Mirt
lipiec 2004
"Wine, Women and Wolves" to pierwsza płyta Smolkena na CD, takim normalnym srebrnym, co samemu się go nie nagra nawet na najlepszym kompie! Mistrz na tym wydawnictwie do współpracy zaprosił znanego z kolektywu Jewelled Antler Glenna Donaldsona. Nie zaowocowało to jednak rewolucją brzmieniową. Właściwie nic się nie zmieniło. W tekstach przegląd wielkich nazwisk, w muzyce cover Taint Meat, noise'owo-bluesowego projektu, który należy gorąco polecić wszystkim fanom Smolkena. Chociaż, przyznam, pierwszy utwór mnie trochę zmylił - jest bardzo Smolkenowy, ale również do granic możliwości minimalistyczny.