Margaret Raven

A short post today - sorry. I had written something much longer only to discover, as I checked through my previous posts, that I had already featured that particular track. Well, 301 posts down the line, surely you can excuse an old man a touch of forgetfulness?

Todays brace of badness comes courtesy of the ever-brilliant Music For Maniacs, an essential blog for lovers of the obscure and perverse, and where, back in 2010, I first discovered the delights of Margaret Raven. 

There's very little I can tell you about the obscure Margaret Raven, apart from that they were based in New York and recorded one album - probably only issued on CD-r and passed around family and friends. 

A couple of the tracks on the album originally appeared on MySpace in 2009: at some point before 2011 the band split. One of the former members of Margaret Raven, posting on the (author and Shaman) Carlos Castaneda forum Sustained Reaction, had this to say: "Margaret Raven was my band. We made really crazy music, nothing like you've ever heard before. Anyway, the music we made was very heavily influenced by Carlos Castaneda. I learned how to play my instrument, Rainmaker, from the devil's weed. There is an old saying that goes "you always know when you hear a crow, but when you hear a sound and have no idea what it is, that's a raven". Our band consisted of Rainmaker, Theremin, and drums. Please give it a listen. These songs are quite a few years old."

I can tell you that an earlier Margaret Raven was a playwright who published the play The Alchemist in 1912, but that's about it. I wish I had more, so if you know anything else about them please do share! 

For now here are two tracks from Margaret Raven: Run Me Rainbow and Fire Atop The Pyramid.

Enjoy!