Four founders of American Neofolk music: "b9 InViD, THOMAS NÖLA, ERIN POWELL and DAVID E. WILLIAMS"
celebrate the founding of the American nation itself with contemporary versions of battle songs from the period.
While untraditional recordings and even performances of these songs are very rare, The Muskets march them into the twenty first century with acoustic psychedelia, noisy martial pop, and choral dark ambience.
There is a hymnlike quality to these tunes, whether they express the dread of a loved one “gone for a soldier” or the joy of a last debauch before certain death.
Weaving between the tracks like a doddering demented lion, a sour King George III condemns, laments and eventually accepts the triumph of liberty, to the accompaniment of disembodied trumpet and distant drums.
This 10” EP features an unprecedented “supergroup” collaboration of 4 American artists of critical and popular note.
Oh yes… and one sneaky Brit.
A musician, writer, actor and filmmaker; b9 InViD performed as one half of Luftwaffe from 1997 to 2013 and now makes music as ET NIHIL.
Thomas Nola is also an actor and filmmaker, most notably for THE DOCTOR (featuring Death in June’s Douglas P as narrator), TO THE WOLVES and BLOOD JUNGLE.
He has released numerous albums as Thomas Nöla et son Orchestre and Thomas Nöla & the Black Hole, and he is the founder and curator of the curiously notorious Disques de Lapin and Eskimo Films.
A self-described “full-time Heathen, journalist, DJ and promoter,” Erin Powell is the Texas-based recording artist behind the project AWEN.
DAVID E. WILLIAMS has released numerous recordings of his demented chamber pop for close to 3 decades, but he has also collaborated with other artists, such as Rozz Williams (Christian Death), Deathpile, Blood Axis (as touring keyboardist), Jerome Deppe and Naevus (not to mention Thomas Nola).
ANDREW KING, who appears here as George III, epitomizes the concept of an artist steeped in the spirit of Tradition while exploiting the technology of the Modern.
He is one of the few neofolk musicians in the world with actual knowledge of actual folk music (encyclopedically so!) and his most recent undertaking is a song cycle related to The Great War (better known to most as World War I).
The disc, pressed on solid red vinyl with a very elegant folding cover, is limited and handnumbered to 300 copies.
