Tony Wakeford should need no further introduction, having made a large oeuvre, mostly with Sol Invictus. Wakeford is especially known for making dark folk music, with well written lyrics. A good introduction to his Sol Invictus work is the album “In Europa”, which was released in 1998 and which contains many classic songs, recorded at various locations in Europe, most of them for a Dutch radio station. Another interesting recording from Wakeford comes under the name of L’Orchestre Noir. The first edition of “Eleven” comes with a bonus 11-track cd, with some alternative versions of songs of the regular cd.
L’Orchestre Noir is a neo-classical side-project, composed by ‘Anthony Charles Wakeford’, as the cover says. He is helped by various musicians, with an important role for strings, trumpet and percussion. There are many impressive tracks on the album, that vary a lot musically, from the medieval chant O Virgo Splendors to some beautiful instrumentals to the great bombastic track What Price. On the last track even a children´s choir appears! On this album, Wakeford draws his inspiration from the culture and history of the various European cultures. Ideologies and war are important themes. As the liner notes say: ‘Although the mood of Eleven is melancholic overall, Wakeford expresses his hope of a one-day peaceful, united yet heterogeneous Europe’.
