A Hawk And A Hacksaw

Originally formed by Jeremy Barnes, the one-time drummer for Neutral Milk Hotel, A Hawk and a Hacksaw issued its self-titled debut album on Leaf Records in 2004. On that record Barnes performed every instrument while surveying twentieth-century American music. The following year the project expanded when tuba player Mark Weaver, trumpeter Dan Clucas, and violinist Heather Trost joined; the resulting Darkness at Noon, cut in both the United Kingdom and Barnes’s hometown of Albuquerque, New Mexico, turned toward Eastern European as well as American folk traditions. By the time of the third album Barnes and Trost—who now constituted the group’s core—traveled to Romania to record with the Gypsy brass band Fanfare Ciocarlia. The Way the Wind Blows, still largely instrumental, appeared in 2006. Later that year Trost and Barnes relocated to Budapest, Hungary, where immersion in the local scene led to performances and sessions with the Hun Hangár Ensemble. Those collaborations yielded the 2007 EP A Hawk and a Hacksaw & the Hun Hangar Ensemble, which earned widespread praise, and its 2009 follow-up Deliverance. March 2011 brought the fifth album, Cervantine, the first release on the band’s own L.M. Dupli-Cation imprint and one shaped by Spanish and Mexican influences. In 2013 the expansive You Have Already Gone to the Other World presented newly composed music for Sergei Parajanov’s 1964 film Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors. Drawing on journeys through Bulgaria, Albania, Turkey, Greece, and Romania, Forest Bathing took its title from the Japanese practice of “Shinrin-yoku,” or “taking in the forest atmosphere,” and surfaced in 2018 once again on L.M. Dupli-Cation.