Crow Tongue Press (reviews and etc)

"The Red Hand Mark" reviews:

"Unsettling folk in a tribal dub. The Red Hand Mark takes some of the choicest elements of melodist Renner and percussionist Hoskin’s debut Ghost : Eye : Seeker debut album into a realm that has refined said elements into little jewels of skeletal splendour steeped in pulpy mass. The music is sickly organic and metered, raw and haunting, and not to do any disservice, quite elementary Goth, but in a fresh way. Don’t let said nomenclature put you off though, another word to do that might be that one in the first sentence: dub.

Beats thunder and therein lies the magic as Hoskin and Renner have meshed three instruments into a sound-defining force of lumbering, encircling thudding sorcery. In their conjurations Renner’s voice he accompanies with the self-created “guimbri-banjo (a bass banjo based on a Morroccan lute)”, with Hoskin on djembe, tabla, heart, and hand-drums. (heart?). They perform these rhythmic folk chants live and near to what is on the album. It’s a dark mesmerise. The dub elements show in how the bass and percussion meld into a sinuous eidolon of pulsating flesh – but it feels more intrinsically ethnic than sterilized samples. If Muslimgauze was forced to use purely organic instrumentation this Crow Tongue album would have been a guide. Folk with a pulse, a heart mayhaps?

As a reinterpretation of their own work, “Prophecies and Secrets (the Red Hand Mark in Dub)” CDr was released in a pre-thought masterplan of inclusion into the former and origin’s digipak (see packaging description below). If there’s a flaw to be found in that plan is that perhaps they should have just forgone the separate sale and released both together as each disc is equally as unassuming as it is deceptively captivating. With Chrome like experimentation and tape-looping pressed with subtle remixing Crow Tongue have dismembered their selves and reworked a golem of danceable death hooked up to marionettish machines. The more ambient pieces sans percussion are the only distraction from the remix.

In the packaging the gimmick truly worked, with Crow Tongue kindly indemnifying User emptiness of just only The Red Hand Mark with the kindly inclusion of the additional disc to this reviewer which according to their website: “will be housed in a flat cover that will fit INSIDE the cover of “The Red Hand Mark” – for those who purchase both.” It’s a true enough statement as it is unexpected and complimentary to the presentation. The Red Hand Mark is a three colour (black, red and white) cross of folded printed card, splattered in angelic and crow imagery in voodoo-like veves on an inverted photographic handprint, but the insides are simply a delight. It is like an old book with etchings of the disastrously demonic in casual and public presentation. Chimeras before God, blood pissing from clouds, rays of ruler light from the crown of the lord who grasps a sickle, as his angels do... all in a pre-1800 style (Lyrics accompany). The disk itself is as righteously visually endowed.

Prophecies and Secrets fit as neatly as said press statement into The Red Hand Mark, and in fact, the latter is rather empty without it... notwithstanding the music. It comes more simply, an asymmetrical tri-fold of white card with black and red inversion of the former hand with angels collage that within binds a black paper window disc holder with the CDr of dub inversions with a small red printed liner note." - Symbolique (Jason Just) at Heathen Harvest

"Without wishing to come on like too much of a grizzled old greybeard, I’ve been writing about music for the dear old Judas Kiss and various other publications for a lot of years now. I’ve listened to a hell of a lot of music in that time, and I’ve written hundreds and hundreds of reviews, covering everything from black metal to bubblegum pop. So it’s not often these days that I hear something which is completely unlike anything I’ve ever heard before. The Red Hand Mark by Crow Tongue, though, manages this difficult feat, which is impressive. It’s also happens to be really, really good, which is even better.

Crow Tongue is a duo consisting of Timothy Renner, a.k.a. tiMOTHy of psychedelic folk band Stone Breath, and percussionist Æ Hoskin. The basis of their music is tiMOTHy’s playing of the guimbri-banjo, a homemade fusion of banjo and guimbri, a lute-like instrument from Morocco, as well as conventional banjo and tamboura-lyre. These plucked melodic instruments are blended with subdued background drones and hand drums including African djembes and Indian tables, as tiMOTHy delivers lugubrious lyrics full of apocalyptic prophecy and Biblical imagery in a deep voice a little like Nick Cave or Markus Wolff of Waldteufel. The end result is part Appalachian bluegrass, part Delta blues, part skiffle, part reggae, part Afrobeat, part traditional English folk, but all startlingly original and compellingly catchy. Scratchy, primitive, sparse, dry, earthy, ethnic-sounding without belonging to any particular tradition of ethnic music, Crow Tongue evoke a connection to the natural world similar to that of Sangre Cavallum, Svarrogh or Ruhr Hunter, without sounding much like any of those bands. There are also points of comparison to the Polish acoustic doom project Wolfmangler and alt-folk acts like The Handsome Family and Bonnie ‘Prince’ Billy, but again, the resemblance isn’t very close. The shuffling, loping rhythms of Crow Tongue’s music is perhaps closest in tempo and spirit to some of the music of Sieben, where the combination of Matt Howden’s plucked violin loops and Jason White’s cajón percussion produces an atmosphere that’s not too far away from what Crow Tongue are doing, although with entirely different instrumentation. If Crow Tongue are looking to expand their musical vocabulary, I think that jaw harp and/or didgeridoo would fit in very well with their existing sound, and of course banjo and fiddle is a well-established double act.

The six tracks of The Red Hand Mark last for 32 minutes altogether, providing a tantalizing, fascinating but all too brief glimpse into the darkly beautiful world of Crow Tongue, a stark, elemental world of angels and ghosts, seeds and roots, stars and moon, owls and, yes, crows. Once you’ve recovered from the shock of this music’s innovation, you’ll feel right at home here, for Crow Tongue sound primordial, as if rather than making new music for your ears, they’re reawakening sounds which have lain dormant in your soul since time immemorial, patiently awaiting the season of their resurrection.

It’s not just me who thinks so either – Crow Tongue’s debut album, Ghost Eye Seeker, was recently featured as Julian Cope’s album of the month on his luridly coloured but informative Head Heritage website. And the Drude is a man of discerning tastes – his previous albums of the month selections have come from such excellent artists as Waldteufel, Allerseelen, Nico, Sunn 0))) and Sturmpercht, so Crow Tongue find themselves in illustrious company.

Available as a separate release is Prophecies and Secrets: The Red Hand Mark In Dub, which (duh!) consists of dub versions of songs taken from The Red Hand Mark. Now, dub isn’t my preferred flavour of groove – I don’t smoke enough weed these days to want to be lost inside an echo chamber for hours at a time – but it’s interesting to hear the results of this highly synthetic production style applied to such primitive, organic music as Crow Tongue’s, and it’s possible that some people might even prefer this sound. I feel pretty much out of my depth reviewing dub, though, so I’m gonna quit while I’m ahead!" - Simon Collins at Judas Kiss Magazine

"...Which brings me to the subject of Aprils Album of the Month, TiMOTHy Revelator and his excellent newest album THE RED HAND MARK (Dark Holler Records), once again recorded with percussionist Æ Hoskin as the duo Crow Tongue. Babies, I weren't joking when I said this gent is knocking them out with clarity and extreme vision, AND six to the dozen. Unlike the previous release, herein, the Revelator has attempted to capture the bands live-in-concert sound, severely reducing the instrumentation to plucked bass banjo and hand drums. But its a shocking melding of linear raga and electric blues, somewhat like sending Kalakackras legendary CRAWLING TO LHASA LP through one of Stockhausens potentiometers. Nice. Again, score this beautifully packaged sucker through Dark Holler Arts." - Julian Cope's Drudion, May 2008 at Head Heritage

"ghost eye seeker" reviews:

"Timothy Renner and Æ Hoskin are the duo of Crow Tongue who present in this debut full length, Ghost : Eye : Seeker a flanging psychedelic free-for-all of weird folk and acidic noise whose mordant emission is enthralling as it is unique.

Charnel distortion from guitar and bowed “instruments” exude a canopy of rustling and prickling noise, a dense miasma of swelter about the self while Eastern instrumentation dovetails amidst the flushed haze steeping the air in psychedelic mysticism. The first five tracks mesh in one form for twenty-five minutes, all represented under the “Ghost Eye Gaze” header. Renner’s voice is as heady as the swelling bosom of instrumental humidity, smouldering phrased mantras as smoke into the drug-shimmering shell Crow Tongue erect. Clawed banjo squeals and slithers in the hunched environs, piercing the veil with scalic soiree’s foreign to Western habitats where lose meter is plumbed by pedal point. The maelstrom of sound-induced opiates is interestingly bereft of Hoskin’s percussive influence, but that comes to the fore in the last three tracks, which compartmentalize the album further, with two conjoined tracks as “Seeker” and the last, a finale deserving of such a token.

The “Seeker” duo is a marked distance from the gauzy heat of “Ghost Eye Gaze” as Hoskin adds his tabla into the mix for the first time, ritualizing the chant with self-induced hypnoidal padding. Summoned bass constructs further libations before Renner’s voice is truly heard and not matted in the quickening acid of the previous five tracks – and it is perfectly eld for objuration. Flanged in light distortion from distant caustic guitars, with a mutating melodic bass line the piece conjures the tribal succinctly. The companion “Seeker” track is an articulating disassembly of the previous tracks’ salient features into their components, a thickened sludge.

Lastly, “Candle, Corpse and Bell” rhythmically entrances with the table of Hoskin again in an entreaty of a different source, with bass and percussion pulsing into each other, and then outward; a dark folk dub that one might expect from Deutsch Nepal, with gloaming disenchanted vocals. It is surprisingly empty of instrumentation but poignant in bloodless repetition.

“Ghost : Eye : Seeker” comes wrapped nearly unadorned, its digipak is black and gloss, and bereft of any imprint, with the cover and rear liner notes of the digipak affixed by way of laser printed sticker upon the gatefold card. Like an inverse Durer engraving the disc is black, etched through to the silver with an etching of a crow." - Symbolique (Jason Just) at Heathen Harvest

"More weirdness from the universe of tiMOTHy Revelator. Every now and then you stumble on an artist who works constantly, recklessly and with intent, like Billy Childish, whose numerous releases speak to that tireless dedication of which we've heard so much and seen...well...not as much. That's tiMOTHy. You have to hand it to the guy: he's a fucking hard worker. And it shows here on “Ghost Eye Seeker,” a heavily raga influenced collection of homemade drones of intense, blithering obsession.

Without fail, anything the rev lays his hands on turns to some phantasmagoric esoterica, and you can expect the same here. Dense, focused sitar-like monuments found the recording, with concealed chants throughout, hollerin' and leapin' up through ricocheting star belts like forlorn howls from Eastern wolves in the most dire seeds of heat. The music pulses, it's alive and shattering, very real in an irreal sort of way and perfectly smashing for that red X you have marked on your calendar as 'that special day for a transcendent meltdown.' Bitches,bastards and heretics alike, commune." 8/10 -- P. Somniferum in Foxy Digitalis

Head Heritage Album of the Month, April 2008

"He’s Mad Enough

Many corporate rock’n’roll Artists, even some highly respected ones, are well-known for agonizing over every stage of their recordings, even in the final run to completion, as though they’re still desperate to keep their precious work from the gaping jaws of the public, insisting on mix after new mix, then perhaps one re-mix more, before finally having their first-new-album-for-five-years prised from their vicelike grip by their record company, thereafter dutifully touring the world and speaking to every kind of media type until the bones of their project has been picked clean. And while getting a new album out of such artists is like getting blood from a stone, just try getting them to stop talking about it once they’ve started. And getting them to start another project? Forget-about-it! These cats are so driven by Celeb (Un-)Consciousness that they don’t even feel that they truly exist unless there’s a full page ad in every magazine and an in-depth career overview for each campaign, so their PR machine’s gotta keep getting them more and more gigs at the Grand Ole Vegaswood Lig, itself an unholy & interminable cycle of ‘ain’t we rad?’ mutual back-slapping. In the meantime, truly Visionary Rock’n’roll Artists – often driven by their own self-imposed deadline – spend their lives Clawing their way up the side of the razor-sharp and slippery scree slope to the top of their own chosen artistic summit; finally standing triumphant at last (but all-too-briefly) atop the Peak, before dashing down again in one breathless running tumble and – after re-establishing base camp – doing it all over. Visionary artists, when they’re right there in the Eye of the Vision, inevitably find themselves surfing some specific and Niagaran tidal wave that pours out of the heavens and cascades into their Third Eyes and fills them up so deep and so quickly that they are, thereafter, always on the point of drowning, capsizing overwhelmed, virtually raped-to-bloody-rawness like they were – in terms of their Metaphysical place in the Cosmos – no more than some tiny human-shaped toby jug, an upright human cabriolet with the hood pulled back, while the Norse God Thor was – after a Friday evening’s mead drinking contest with his buds Odin and Tyr – pissing the entire honey-tinted contents of his distended belly into their head from 10,000 feet above. Yup, for the Visionary, it never rains but it pours, downpours continuously, comes down in sheets, flooding out so quickly that the Visionary Artist may even be forced to form projects with different names, offshoots, fake ensembles, any-fucking-thing to extract that aircraft hangar-sized inventory of stuff from inside their head. They gotta kick that Gnostic shit out, so they can … start all over again from the beginning because it just keeps building up; new information is constantly stacking up in their melted plastic brains. Indeed, the Death of each project and the Birth of each subsequent one is so essential to the Visionary Artist that their Visions will coagulate and solidify if they are not facilitated by those around them. Constant Renewal is essential. At James Brown’s artistic height, so constant were his revelations that he always had a side project (the JB’s in their various guises, Fred Wesley solo LPs, etc) on the go whenever he was recording a major new album: 1) for the sake of his Mental Health, and 2) because the formerly dirt-poor James couldn’t bear to waste a single moment in an expensive studio. Even the well-heeled-from-birth Miles Davis was the same for decades, propelled by Inner Demons and churning out ideas so fast that overtaxed musicians & recording engineers fell like flies. When the ever-fertile Neil Young recorded briefly for the uber-corporate-and-proud-of-it Geffen Records back in the mid-1980s, the sudden pressure to over-promote everything and slow down his natural recording tempo nearly sent Young insane (when Geffen Records denied Kurdt Cobain the constant renewal his Hazardous Inner Life demanded, nay, commanded, then The Blonde One was forced to take his own life rather than spend the next two years factory-milking the udders of the IN UTERO cow until they were – to his Fast-Forward-Thinking Fertile Crescent mind – drier than your dead great-grandmother’s tits). The evidence is strong that the most ingenious of those Visionary Artists at their shamanic peak will employ any & every moment as a springboard, a new catapult to project them further further, ever further into their Trip. At 3.10 minutes into the title-track of The Doors’ THE SOFT PARADE, Jimbo refuses to allow engineer Bruce Botnick to edit out his vocal stumble about its being ‘the best part of the trip’ so as to provide us with evidence that he’s so deep in that Trip he’s become almost pre-verbal, Patti Smith provides us with similar evidence in the form of a little giggle and the comment ‘It was really great, man’ exactly 4 minutes and 30 seconds into RADIO ETHIOPIA’s ‘Poppies’, whilst at 7.24 minutes into ‘The Lowest Reaches of Our Highest Preaches’ on Zodiac Mountain’s 2007CE avant-commune classic LAKE WINNEBAGO, poet/ruffian Clay Ruby, rather than editing out an accidental cough, instead turns it into a Vesuvian lava shower of vocaleptics, Ruby becoming as some dog-headed priest standing on the very landing-strip employed to fly Mother Nature’s silver seed to her new home in the Sun. Moreover, however righteous their overall Trip may be, many of even the most eco-friendly Visionary Artists care not one jot about how much of their home planet’s raw material is used in the execution of their Trip, because – right there at that moment – their Truth is the Absolute; they’re delivering, and if they don’t birth this lickle babby right Now, motherfucker, then they will be forced to do a Von LMO and enter suspended animation. Which brings us to the subject of this April Album of the Month – Timothy Renner AKA TiMOTHy Revelator, who is currently ‘enjoying’ a similar position, barfing out album-after-album, project-after-project, in a berserk effort to soothe his achingly over-worked brow. Under the earlier monikers Stone Breath and Black Happy Day, occasionally under his own nom de guerre TiMOTHY Revelator, or now as leader of the duo Crow Tongue, this artist is currently blasting forth huge statements whose importance may not be recognised until years hence. Yes, ladies’n’gentlemen, TiMOTHy Revelator has something very specific to say, and – or so it appears to this writer – he will build any vehicle in his power to say it ... ALL. ‘I am a chancer’, I declared on DARK ORGASM’s ‘White Bitch Comes Good’. TiMOTHy’s chance is Now and he lives it in the Moment. I’ve heard much of his music, but have never before felt compelled to broadcast an All Points Bulletin. But this particular Crow Tongue album is, I believe, the place to start. Over an incessant & honking Appalachian post-Henry Flynt duo-drone somewhat akin to Tyrannosaurus Rex during their notorious Doom Donovan phase, ie: at M. Bolan’s most spectacularly portentous and archly Semitic, singer TiMOTHy Revelator intones seemingly endless declarations of world destruction and blasts invocations out into the Universe. Bass banjo drones, hand drums and a spectacular Old Testament-style vocal delivery are all transmitted our way via the most intensely claustrophobic almost entombed production. Much of TiMOTHy’s other music is far more attractive in the traditional sense (ie: more palatable) but this particular Crow Tongue release is – to my mind – the most useful place to start by far; useful enough for me to feel the need to declare possible comradeship with him, despite his having named himself Christian. A Christian? Cough, splutter, aghast stares. Free your minds, Brother & Sister Motherfuckers, as I had to do … for the Revelator’s Christianity is closer to our Heathenism, our Paganism, nay, (for many) our Damned Satanism than it is to any Popery, Anglicanism, or foolish Orthodoxy. In the late ‘60s, Tokyo’s J.A. Caesar advertised his apocalyptic music as being:

“Voodoo rock that invokes blood and the memory of blood.”

So it is with TiMOTHy. This Revelator music may claim to be Christian, but what a bloody and pagan Christianity it is. For the Revelator embraces both the blood and the darkness in the void, continually invoking the Sun, the Moon, the Twilight, the Darkness … hell, kiddies, its veritably Armenian in its worship of the Christ; it’s like some throwback to the sort of arcane early Christianity that still had to rub shoulders with the worshippers of bollockless Attis & his old lady Cybele, and with the shrill-voiced effeminate priests of Frey dragging their God/Idol through the muddy fields of Jutland. TiMOTHy’s practising an Ur-Christianity from back when it was still just one-of-many cults competing for bums-on-seats, so it had to accept the pagans upon the heath and their desire to worship this new Peace God the old way, which – to the Armenians right up from AD301 to the present day – has involved dumping headless birds across carved Bronze Age monoliths, themselves Christianized by having been incised with fantastic khatchkar crosses, the smeared blood crusting those exquisitely detailed carved lines. It’s Noah sacrificing the lamb on the Tukh Manukh stone altar on the Mithraic hill of Etchmiadzin at the foot of Mt Ararat. A bloody covenant, children. A vandal handshake through the hole of the Odin Stone up at Stenness, on Orkney Mainland; a handshake and the inevitable cutting of flesh/spilling of blood. Directly interfacing with the Divine Godhead. No second-hand la-di-da Vicar-ious Remove back then, Gnostic punches monotonously & repeatedly thrown at the unprotected head. I know I have a tendency sometimes to hyperbolize too soon, so don’t mistakenly think I’m already asking y’all: So, is TiMOTHy really a reborn Grigory the Enlightener screaming from the hell-hole that was Khor Virap? As evidenced by the brevity of this review, I ain’t saying because it’s way too early to tell, and I don’t wanna heft any unnecessary pressure on this artist neither. Besides, a Visionary Artist’s Truth takes at least 30 years to take form in others’ heads. I’ll tell y’all this, though, the wave currently being surfed by the Revelator could be as useful to us as any I’ve yet encountered – even that of mein hairy Stephen O’Malley – in the eight-year Album of the Month sojourn I’ve made thus far into the Godless lands of the virtual 21st Century. Whether or not this shit sticks, only Old Father Time will tell us. Until then, look to the Whore Rising, salute the Odin and the rest of the Heroes, kick the Gods’ lard arses into touch, and hail TiMOTHy Revelator as being one highly useful Son of the Bitch." - Julian Cope, Head Heritage

At the very least Crow Tongue’s debut album “Ghost Eye Seeker” is an eccentric listen. Hailing from Beat Heart, Pennsylvania this three piece drone/doom/experimental outfit has created a sound that I’ve never heard before. If you were to throw Neurosis, Earth, and Tabla Beat Science into a blender you would end up with Crow Tongue; As a result “Ghost Eye Seeker” is a homogenous mixture of genres that range from doom-metal, funk, electronica, psychedelic, and folk.

“Ghost Eye Seeker” is comprised of eight tracks, but is essentially broken down into two separate halves. The first five tracks on the album are all a part of the “ghost eye gaze” saga which is a constant build-up that lasts for twenty-five minutes. The album stars out Ghost Eye Gaze:Ghost Eye See which is five minutes of guitar buzzing backed by zany sitar sounds and a middle-eastern-esque beat. As the saga continues eerie keyboard landscapes are added as well as hypnotic sitar playing, glitchy electronics, and droning vocal chants. This piece is very repetitious yet it touches up on such a wide variety of genres because of all the odd instruments that it incorporates. By the end of this twenty-five piece epic Crow Tongue will have you in a trance; as a whole these five songs mesh together beautifully to create a truly spectral and bizarre atmosphere.

The second half of “Ghost Eye Seeker” continues the acid-folk/tribal-fusion madness that is present during the first five songs, and this could be seen as a flaw. Seeker: Seeker Chant contains the same deadbeat droning pace, only it incorporates a more minimal sound featuring dense drum beats and a slow, gluey synth progression. While this piece showcases a more dreary atmosphere and use of analog synthesizers the repetitive guitar reverb is still present.

While “Ghost Eye Seeker” isn’t something that I’ll put on to listen to very often it’s still an entertaining plunge into a diverse set of genres. The repetitious nature of the album may put a lot of people off at first, but after multiple listens the subtle changes that occur during each movement become more relevant and enhance the listening experience. It may not be very accessible, but it’s hard to deny the fact that “Ghost Eye Seeker” is a truly astounding and captivating listen. - Chris Jackson, Sputnik Music