A Hawk and a Hacksaw

A Hawk and a Hacksaw album coming soon.

A Hawk & a Hacksaw.
12 March 2013

There’s no doubting US duo A Hawk and a Hacksaw‘s excellent musical breeding. Accordionist Jeremy Barnes is a past member of cult group Neutral Milk Hotel and both he and violinist Heather Trost worked on Balkan folk artist Zachary Condon (aka Beirut’s) 2006 album Gulag Orkestar. Like the aforementioned Santa Fe native, they too hail from New Mexico, while working with those Eastern influences centered around the Black Sea. So it’s not really any surprise that their sixth album, produced by John Dieterich of Deerhoof, has the title You Have Already Gone To The Other World: Music Inspired By Paradjanov’s Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors coming out on their own L.M. Dupli-cation label on April 2.

As the name implies, this is music inspired by the Georgian-born Armenian film director, Sergei Paradjanov, and his  film Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors. A director working in socialist realism across the USSR (namely, Ukraine, Armenia and Georgia) he, like A Hawk and a Hacksaw was the product of a unifying world order. But where Paradjanov’s was Soviet Russia, there’s is a result of the wonders of globalisation in a Westernised Eastern folk sound that paddles through a Black Sea of accordion, fiddle and rousing staccato rhythm.**

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