In a haunted cover album, 16hp pays tribute to their influences, from medieval Flemish music to Joy Division and from Arvo Pärt to Nick Cave. An album made by a fan, which could make you feel again like being a fan.

Mostly made of covers and adaptations of traditional songs, Folklore, 16 Horsepower's 5th album, is frontman David Eugene Edwards' (DEE) tribute to the music that influenced him. To folklore, an earthy music that went back under the earth, an allegedly dead style which DEE, that little runt, feeds on as a means of survival. Folklore is an album that deserves patient, repeated listenings. It shows an apt evolution in 16hp's music, a turn started with Woven Hand, DEE's outstanding solo project.

"When I wrote the songs of Woven Hand, I was listening to a lot of French or Flemish medieval music. Woven Hand is not as heavy, not as Western movie-like as 16hp, there's really something European in Woven Hand."

And the journey is not over. 16hp goes on growing away from the hillbilly-punk genre with which we discovered them six years ago.

When listening to Folklore, at first you'll think you've fallen down into a well. The sleeve matches the music; it's black and hard. Marble or cold lava. A gravestone or a silent movie. Then you get used to darkness and discover the entrance of a tunnel. You can hear the Carter's family Single Girl, Married Girl, along with Hank Williams' Alone and Forsaken, a Cajun song sung in French, a Hungarian mazurka and a traditional Mongolian song. You can hear the echo of those frightening white baptist choirs of Southern USA. Everywhere, you can feel Joy Division's dark, massive influence.

This is an excellent 16hp album, the best since quite a while. To yesterday's bilious "dead runs", the band now prefers silent spells and waitings, instrumental textures and motionless duels. Not as dry as it seems, 16hp's music is a sponge. These days, DEE has been listening to the complete works of Smog, Arvo Pärt and Jordi Savall. He could've just as well been listening to the Bad Seeds or Dirty Three.

"In general, people want to label me as furious hillbilly, like on our first album Sackcloth 'n' Ashes. It's part of what I am, what I do and what I like, but the world is big and there are so many things which influence me. One changes, one grows up, even the way I play my old songs does change. I'm not afraid of changing. Each of us has evolved within the band, so the music grows up in consequence. With Folklore, we wanted to express other atmospheres, maybe a bit more of quietness."

Folklore is an album made by a fan, which could make you feel again like being a fan. Also, it's an album which makes you feel like listening to a lot of other records. It's an opportunity to get away, a fantastic imaginary cavalcade from the plains of Colorado to the mountains of Altaï. It's the opportunity to remember that, in this kind of journey, the most important isn't what you discover but what you find again, what reunites men. All things considered, once you've listened closely to the album, you realise that the Mongolian nomads' throaty singing isn't that remote from Blind Willie Johnson's gospel-blues, native American psalmodies or baptist polyphonies.

There is in that record the wonderful idea that all the musics are just one, one music as changing and boundless as the sky. The primeval, humble music of horse-breeders, farmers, of people who pray. There is in that record the idea that folklore is a matter of repertoire. The singer hides behind songs that are older, bigger than him, songs with a magical, spiritual, religious gist. "Music is a creation from God, He gave it to us to help us understand Him, understand each other and link everything." DEE defines folklore as a mere matter of stories, "stories that people went through as individuals and as members of a community, stories that people have in common, stories based on life."
DEE's story is first and foremost the story of his family: protestants from Edinburgh who settled in America to evangelise Indians. One of his forebears married an Indian girl. Another one, left to fend for himself when he was 11, lived like a hobo, with a tame bear. His grandparents on his father's side bred cattle -they were cowboys- in Colorado. His grandfather on his mother's side was a Nazarene preacher, from a fundamentalist church created in Texas in 1908.

DEE first came across music with the church, as everybody does in the USA. And also with his grandfather's Johnny Cash records. As a teenager, he played the drums in punk-rock bands, then discovered Joy Division and started 16hp (the name comes from a Jimmie Rodgers song) with two French musicians. After four more or less exciting albums and fiery, trance-like gigs, 16hp unearthed Folklore and took a fresh start. Now, DEE is not only this dude who comes straight out of one of Cormac McCarthy's novels, this dude who manhandled his banjo, hooting ancient American songs: now, he's not only "old time", he's become "far away".

Since all this sounds quite thrilling, let's point out now that DEE's mood isn't exactly the state of mind of an explorer who's just discovered a new continent. 16hp's music has changed : it's quieter, more spacious, more open and relieved of constraint. Yet DEE himself hasn't changed. He still sings as if his teeth were clenched, with fear gnawing at his gut and Satan's hounds hot on his heels. "I live with fear, it comes from the upbringing I was given within a church that didn't allow women to wear make-up or dresses, a church in which the threat of hell was omnipresent. A pointed finger and negation, all the time. As a child, I used to respect all this, then playing in punk bands was my way to rebel. But now I know that to rebel was something stupid. Growing up in fear hasn't necessarily been something bad for me. It sets me now in a good position to know my place in the world -and in relation to God. It enables me to be not too confident, not to think I'm more important than I actually am. It's a humble attitude that I like. At each gig, I'm really surprised to see that the audience is there and enjoying themselves. I always expect people to tell me "that's enough now, we've seen you too much." It may be a protection for me: I always expect the worst so that I'm not taken aback when it happens."

Translation by Magali.