A Hawk And Hacksaw Tour Starts Today!

3/29    Eskisehir    TR    Peyote   
3/30    Istanbul    TR    Salon IKSV   
4/5    Paris    FR    Espace B   
4/6    Bayonne    FR    Apollo Fest   
4/7    Brussels    BE    Cinema Nova   
4/9    Gent    BE    Handelsbeurs   
4/10    Offenbach    DE    Hafen 2   
4/11    Duisburg    DE    Steinbruch   
4/12    Hamburg    DE    Kampnagel    
4/13    Berlin    DE    Privatclub   
4/14    Warsaw    PL    Pardon, To Tu   
4/16    Norwich    UK    Arts Centre   
4/17    London    UK    Lexington   
4/18    Brighton    UK    The Haunt   
4/19    Manchester    UK    Soup Kitchen   
4/20    Glasgow    UK    Platform    Outskirts Festival
4/21    Leeds    UK    Brudenell Social Club   
4/23    Dubin    IE    Workman's Club   
4/23    Dublin    IE    Workman's Club   
4/24    Cork    IE    Half Moon Theatre   
4/26    Oxford    UK    St Michael at the Northgate   
4/27    Nottingham    UK    Bodega   
4/28    Cambridge    UK    The Junction   
5/3    Ravenna    IT    Hana-Bi   
5/6    Catania    IT    Cine Teatro Odeon   
5/7    Rome    IT    Monti Unplugged   
5/10    Zaragoza    EP    Centro Civico Rio Ebro   
5/13    Huesca    EP    Matadero   
5/15    Valencia    EP    La Limera   
5/16    Castellon    EP    Centre Municipal   
5/17    Madrid    EP    La Faena II   
5/18    Lisbon    PO    The Music Box   
5/23    New York    NY    Lincoln Center   
5/30    Tucson    AZ    Solar Culture   
5/31    San Diego    CA    The Loft at UCSD   
6/1    Los Angeles    CA    Bootleg Theater    
6/2    San Francisco    CA    Cafe du Nord   
6/3    Hayfork    CA    Northern Delights   
6/4    Portland    OR    Mississippi Studios   
6/5    Seattle    CA    Barboza   
6/6    Boise    ID    Neurolux   
6/7    Salt Lake City    UT    Kilby Court   
6/8    Denver    CO    Walnut Room   
6/15    Albuquerque    NM    Sister   
7/11    Santa Fe    NM    Bandstand @ Santa Fe Plaza   

New Jam From A Hawk And A Hacksaw.

Jeremy Barnes & Heather Trost give us a little taste of what's in store for the new A Hawk And A Hacksaw album coming out sometime this year on their own L.M. Dupli-cation label. Keep an eye out for an official release date. Upcoming European tour dates HERE.

Podcast #46 Is Ready!

Aye, another Revolver USA podcast is ready for your listening pleasure. Cast #46 features February 2011 releases with music by : A Hawk and a Hacksaw, Go Team, Beans, Ben Butler and Mousepad, Distractions, Sonic Youth, Firesign Theater, Howlin Rain, Neurosis and Refrigerator. Total time: 30:05.

Download and streaming options can be found at the usual destination:
REVOLVER POD PAGE. 

Or find this podcast and other podcasts in the Free Downloads section of Digital page on the Midheaven site. 

Podcast #19 Is A Wiener.....I Mean Winner!

In Podcast #19 Captain Uli and the Pots-dawg delve into somewhat newish (still playing the catch up game) Revolver Exclusives: Pylon, Shrinebuilder, Yoga, A Hawk & A Hacksaw, Damon & Naomi, Boxcutter, Bricolage, Witch Hunt, James Blackshaw, Buffalo Stance, Anathallo, and Blank Dogs. You can stream or download an AAC file of this podcast and all other Revolver podcasts at the Revolver pod-page: http://www.midheaven.com/audio/podcast/

It also appears in the free downloads page on the newly improved Midheaven Mailorder site.

For those who track podcast updates using RSS readers, here's our feed: http://www.midheaven.com/audio/podcast/podcast.xml

On iTunes, you can find our podcast at: itpc://http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=281174094

A Hawk And A Hacksaw

A Hawk And A Hacksaw's latest album Delivrance reviewed on Baeble blog:

".....Named after a line from Hamlet, AHAAH does the bard proud by turning every song into a web of intrigue and storytelling. Sometimes, words are insufficient. Sometimes the most lyrical music is the kind that doesn't need to beat you over the head with witticisms. Almost all the songs are exclusively instrumental, and the galloping violin, whimsical accordion, and eclectic orchestra (which includes everything from the upright bass, cello, and clarinet, to the bouzouki and cimbalom) weave fireside tales of sharing soup with mustached villagers, galloping along the Danube in a horse-drawn buggy, dancing late into the night on the cobblestones in the main square....." Read full review HERE.

Upcoming US tour:
09/12 Chicago, IL @ Empty Bottle (The Wire present Adventures in Modern Music)
09/14 Cleveland, OH @ Beachland Tavern
09/15 Pittsburgh, PA @ Your Inner Vagabond
09/16 Toronto, ON @ The Drake Hotel
09/17 Montreal, QC @ Il Motore (w/ Damon & Naomi)
09/18 Boston, MA @ YMCA Theatre (w/ Damon & Naomi)
09/19 New York, NY @ Le Poisson Rouge (w/ Damon & Naomi)
09/20 Washington, DC @ Rock N' Roll Hotel(w/ Damon & Naomi)
09/22 Chapel Hill, NC @ Nightlight
09/23 Asheville, NC @ Grey Eagle Tavern and Music Hall (w/ Damon & Naomi)
09/24 Athens, GA @ The Melting Pot (w/ Damon & Naomi)
09/25 Atlanta, GA E.A.R.L. (w/ Damon & Naomi)
09/26 Knoxville, TN @ Pilot Light (w/ Damon & Naomi)
10/03 Albuquerque, NM @ Outpost Performance Space
10/06 Tucson, AZ @ Solar Culture
10/07 San Diego, CA @ Casbah
10/08 Los Angeles, CA @ Spaceland (w/ Damon & Naomi)
10/09 San Francisco, CA @ Independent (w/ Damon & Naomi)
10/10 Eureka, CA @ Nocturnum (w/ Damon & Naomi)
10/11 Eugene, OR @ Cozmic Pizza (w/ Damon & Naomi)
10/12 Portland, OR @ Doug Fir (w/ Damon & Naomi)
10/13 Seattle, WA @ Tractor Tavern (w/ Damon & Naomi)
10/15 Salt Lake City, UT @ Urban Lounge (w/ Damon & Naomi)
10/16 Denver, CO @ Hi-Dive (w/ Damon & Naomi)

Jeremy Barnes of AHAAH Busts Some Knowledge On Romanian Folk Jams.

Jeremy Barns of A Hawk And A Hacksaw compiled a righeous top 20 list of Romanian records for Factmagazine.com. Included in the feature are photos, album artwork and even a downloadable mini-mix of some of the artists covered. It's a fascinating lightning speed introduction to the genre. Rock the cimbalom!

Read the full feature HERE.

A Hawk And A Hacksaw Video From Upcoming Album.

A HAWK AND A HACKSAW: I am not a gambling man from Home is Wherever You Are on Vimeo.

A Hawk And A Hacksaw At 78 RPMs!

Ultra cool A Hawk And A Hacksaw Foni Tu Argile 10" goes on sale this Monday (4/20/09). The records are cut at 78 RMP and there are only 500 of them in the world. Get'em while you can.

AHAAH is currently playing a string of dates opening up for Wilco:
04/15 Milwaukee, WI @ Pabst Theater
04/16 Bloomington, IN @ University Auditorium @ University of Indiana
04/17 Athens, OH @ Memorial Auditorium @ University of Ohio
04/18 Knoxville, TN @ Tennessee Theatre
04/20 Athens, GA @ Classic Center Grand Hall
04/21 Asheville, NC @ Thomas Wolfe Auditorium
04/22 Birmingham, AL @ Sloss Furnaces
04/23 Oxford, MS @ The Lyric

A Hawk And A Hacksaw on NPR/The World

Nice little A Hawk And A Hacksaw segment on The World, which is a nationally syndicated PRI show that airs on over 200 NPR stations. Check out the link below.

February 7, 2008
Global hit – A Hawk and a Hacksaw

The musical group, A Hawk and a Hacksaw, hail from Albuquerque. They play Hungarian and Romanian music. Recently, they performed as the house band at a Romanian restaurant in London. The World's Hugo Boothby caught up with them there.

AHAAH are touring the Pacific Rim & playing ATP!
02/20 Perth, AUS @ Perth Beck's Music Box (International Arts Festival)
02/23 Wellington, NZ @ Pacific Blue Festival Club (International Arts Festival)
02/23 Wellington, NZ @ Pacific Blue Festival Club (International Arts Festival)
05/16-18 Butlin's Minehead, UK@ All Tomorrow's Parties

AHAAH and Beirut in the NY Times

By WILL HERMES
Published: October 21, 2007
SURE, the half-naked acrobat suspended by her ankles from the ceiling was remarkable. So was the battered tuba wrapped in red Christmas lights, played by a musician in a black cocktail dress.

Tony Cenicola/The New York Times
Vampire Weekend sometimes draws on African sounds.
Multimedia

Billy Tompkins/Retna
Beirut shows the influences of Balkan brass bands.
Yet the most striking thing about DeVotchKa's circuslike show at the Spiegeltent at the South Street Seaport in Manhattan in August was the music, a quilt of sounds from the international section of the iTunes store. One could hear mariachi ballads, polkas, horas and Gypsy tunes played on accordion, bouzouki, violins. But those sounds informed songs that also echoed the rhythmic bluster and vocal drama of 1980s alternative-rock acts like the Smiths and Talking Heads. The band's cross-cultural recipe was made explicit when the young crowd began sloshing its beers to a bouncy, Balkanized version of the Velvet Underground's "Venus in Furs."

On any given night in an American rock club you can hear bands like Gogol Bordello, Man Man, Beirut and Balkan Beat Box playing odd-metered songs drawing on the rhythms of Eastern European Gypsy music. You might encounter Antibalas or Vampire Weekend riffing on African sounds, Dengue Fever making psychedelic Cambodian pop or a D.J. like Diplo spinning Brazilian funk. On the recent "Kala," a contender for the year's most exciting pop album, the British-Sri Lankan rapper M.I.A., who works from Brooklyn, draws on Indian, African and West Indian sounds. The folk-rocker Devendra Banhart creates fusions with Mexican and Brazilian musicians on his recent CD, "Smokey Rolls Down Thunder Canyon." And the veteran musical adventurer Bjork toured this year with a West African percussion troupe and Chinese pipa virtuoso.

Increasingly the back-to-basics movement that has characterized cutting-edge rock this century, from the blues-based hard rock of the White Stripes to the new wave-postpunk revivalism of Interpol, is giving way to music that looks further afield for its influences. And one result is a clutch of acts, many of them from New York, that are internationalizing rock's Anglo-American vernacular.

This is not the first time. Artists like Paul Simon, Peter Gabriel, the Clash and Talking Heads drew polyglot styles into their mix back in the 1980s, often with politics in tow. (Mr. Simon and Mr. Gabriel were exploring African pop during the Apartheid era.) But the impulse has been largely missing from rock's bag of tricks for a while. And in the case of Beirut and Vampire Weekend, it is producing some of the year's most buzzed-about new music — music that often feels less studied and less overtly political than that of these groups' fusion-minded forebears.

Why now? Partly it seems the natural cycle of genres; every back-to-basics art movement dead-ends and requires an infusion of new ideas. And certainly the Internet has made even the most obscure global music easily available.

"Access is key," said Bill Bragin, director of the Manhattan club Joe's Pub, which books a large number of international acts. "A blogger or someone says: 'Check out this cool record by Konono No. 1. It's really bizarre, super loud Congolese thumb piano music.' And suddenly all these people are checking them. Also, bands like Antibalas and Balkan Beat Box and Gogol Bordello and Beirut are very good about positioning themselves in the context of youth culture. They're not pigeonholed as speaking only to the age-30-to-50 world-music crowd."

You might guess that current global politics have also had a role in spurring the trend. And they have, though not always explicitly. M.I.A. and Bjork both address politics directly on their recent albums. Gogol Bordello and Antibalas, two of melting-pot New York's fusion-minded veterans, also make politically charged music. Fronted by the Kiev-born Eugene Hutz, Gogol Bordello mixes Slavic and Balkan music with punk rock and plenty of other styles, peppered with lyrics addressing the immigrant experience and "cultural revolution." Antibalas has revived and advanced Afrobeat, the Africanized funk fusion pioneered by the Nigerian bandleader Fela Kuti, from whom they have also adopted a strong anti-authoritarian demeanor. Both bands have addictively kinetic new records and are beginning to attract wider attention. (Mr. Hutz recently performed with Madonna at the Live Earth festival, and he and his band have contributed to her forthcoming short film, "Filth and Wisdom.")

But a new wave of bands is using ethnic styles in less pointed ways. One of last year's more left-field Internet success stories was the debut by Beirut, a project initiated by Zach Condon, a 21-year-old singer-songwriter who began a love affair with the Balkan brass-band tradition while exploring electronic music at his parents' home in Albuquerque. Mr. Condon played almost everything on that album, "Gulag Orkestar," and its arrangements for trumpet, accordion, ukulele, mandolin, violin and percussion conjure the image of a street-corner Gypsy band somewhere in postwar Europe. For the new Beirut record, "The Flying Club Cup," released this month on the tiny Ba Da Bing label, he employs a full band to play his Eurail rock, which continues to roam.

"I'm going for a style that's really outdated: 1940s French chanson," Mr. Condon said over Korean barbecue and beer at a restaurant in his neighborhood in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. "I'm really obsessed with Jacques Brel, Charles Aznavour and early Serge Gainsbourg." Mr. Condon, waifish and blue-eyed, was dressed in an old T-shirt with a bedhead hairdo, and it was easy to imagine him ministering to swooning jeunesse back in the day. Yet his dramatic, warbly vocal style also conjures '80s rock crooners like Morrissey and the Cure's Robert Smith.

While Mr. Condon, whose ethnic heritage is primarily Irish-English, has been spending time in Paris of late, he admits his approach to international styles is more instinctive than studied. Nick Urata, lead singer of the Denver band DeVotchKa, operates similarly. Speaking from a tour stop in Germany, he noted that while some of his band mates were schooled in Eastern European music, he was not, and in any case stylistic accuracy was not the point. "The 'authentic' Gypsy brass-band stuff is great, but it's better to leave it to the masters," he said. "We figured we were never going to nail it exactly, so why not just take it into our own realm?"

Vampire Weekend, which came together while its members were students at Columbia and has a debut CD slated for January on the independent label XL, makes its music in the same spirit. It's noted for using African-flavored rhythms and guitar phrases in its upbeat pop-rock, notably on its signature "Cape Cod Kwassa Kwassa" ( myspace.com/vampireweekend), whose title refers in part to a Congolese style. But rather than replicating an "authentic" sound (the song isn't, in fact, kwassa kwassa), the band is more interested in collage, understandable for a young group weaned on the cut-and-paste aesthetic of hip-hop.

"I was always a big rap fan," said Ezra Koenig, 23, the group's singer and guitarist. "I'd go to that Web site The-Breaks.com to find the sample source for a song, and I was always excited when the music came from some weird place."

Mr. Koenig also noted his affection for older rock acts that experimented with reggae and/or world music. Records like "Remain in Light" by Talking Heads and "Sandinista!" by the Clash were cited as touchstones by nearly all the artists interviewed. Which makes sense: Just as those bands were reacting to punk rock's creative cul-de-sac in the 1970s and '80s, many of the current bands are reacting to a modern retro-rock trend that has grown stale. "That was definitely something we didn't want to do," Mr. Koenig said. "And one way to do something new was to look at different sources."

Some groups have gone to greater lengths to tap these sources. Ian Eagleson and Alex Minoff, who played together in the indie-rock band Golden in the late 1990s, formed Extra Golden with local musicians in Kenya, where Mr. Eagleson was working on a doctoral dissertation in ethnomusicology. Their experience has been more challenging than that of many of their peers. For instance there was the time Nairobi police showed up at a party at Mr. Eagleson's apartment and discovered an uninvited guest had some marijuana cigarettes, an incident that cost the band roughly $10,000 to keep the members out of jail.

Then there was the problem of getting the band's Kenyan members, some of whom lacked passports, to the United States for a debut tour last year. The process took months and was not complete until an 11th-hour intervention by staff members for Senator Barack Obama, Democrat of Illinois, who were assisting promoters of the Chicago World Music Festival, where the group was scheduled to play. By way of a thank-you, one of the standouts on the group's spirited new album, "Hera Ma Nono" — a fluid mix of American rock, New Orleans funk and the guitar-based Kenyan benga style on the indie-rock label Thrill Jockey — is a traditional-style African praise song titled "Obama."

American pop musicians adopting styles of other nations have often been accused of cultural colonialism or dismissed as dilettantes. In the Web magazine PopMatters (popmatters.com ), one critic wondered if Beirut's music is simply "a tourist's picture postcard" that devalues its cultural source material. Vampire Weekend, perhaps hoping to pre-empt criticism, cheekily calls its music "Upper West Side Soweto." But neither group is pretending to be anything but what it is: an indie-rock band with diverse musical appetites.

Yet in an age when an Anglo-Sri Lankan pop act like M.I.A. raps over samples of Brazilian dance music that reshapes American electro-funk, ideas of authenticity and cultural ownership are slippery. And there is something encouraging in the way younger acts like Beirut and Vampire Weekend can draw on world music styles without needing to turn the act into a political statement, an imperative that doesn't always serve the art in question. It's also worth noting, as Mr. Bragin points out, that musicians outside the Anglo-American axis of indie rock, like Nação Zumbi and DJ Dolores from Brazil, are busy making cutting-edge fusions. "There's a lot more dialogue lately," he said.

A result, in some cases, is a new breed of fusion that keeps its politics implicit and exists in a nether region between genres. That's a place Jeremy Barnes is happy to be. A former member of the influential '90s indie-rock band Neutral Milk Hotel (which he notes was strongly influenced by Bulgarian traditional music) and briefly a participant in Beirut, Mr. Barnes now lives in Hungary, where he records neo-traditional music with local musicians and his collaborator, Heather Trost, under the name a Hawk and a Hacksaw.

"Aesthetically I love indie rock," he said by cellphone from Tura, a small town where he was collaborating with the cymbalon player Unger Balazs. "And I find the world-music industry nauseating. There's a lot of bad recordings and bad artwork. But when people define us in either of those categories, I cringe."

"We love Hungarian music and think it's beautiful, so how can we ignore it?" he added. "You can't lie to yourself."

More A Hawk And A Hacksaw Coverage On Pitchfork

A Hawk and a Hacksaw and the Hun Hangár Ensemble
A Hawk and a Hacksaw and the Hun Hangár Ensemble
[Leaf Label; 2007]
Rating: 7.3

There's a twinkle of lore in A Hawk and a Hacksaw and the Hun Hangár Ensemble, the limited edition, eight-track EP that follows A Hawk and a Hacksaw's best album to date, last year's The Way the Wind Blows. As the band puts it, they "walked into a music store in Budapest, Hungary and walked out with a score of four collaborators versed not only in Hungarian folk, but also...jazz and minimalism." Béla Ágoston, Zsolt Kürtösi, Ferenc Kovács, and Balázs Unger became the ad hoc Hun Hangár Ensemble, sharing their ancestral repertoire with Hacksaw's Jeremy Barnes and Heather Trost and allowing the two younger musicians to add their own arrangements and ideas. Such obvious cultural immersion may sound disingenuous or self-serving, but it works here and on the accompanying tour diary DVD, finally allowing A Hawk and a Hacksaw the chance to bloom amid a parcel of the folk heritage from which they've long drawn.

A Hawk and a Hacksaw's growth has always been collaboration-dependent, so this EP, which takes the group's interest in Eastern European folk to more traditionally rooted depth, comes as little surprise. It actually feels natural in a reverse sort of way: The band's eponymous debut was all Barnes, the former Neutral Milk Hotel and Bright Eyes drummer. It was a hodgepodge of American and Eastern European folk-- parlor pianos, singing accordions, generous rhythms and rooster calls-- plied beneath experimentation with tape manipulation, vocal effects, and found sounds like telephone bells. Barnes had gone peripatetic by the second album, Darkness at Noon, dividing his time between his native New Mexico, England and Prague, picking up motifs and players along the way. Violinist and pianist Heather Trost was the one that stuck, joining Barnes for Darkness and The Way The Wind Blows. Those sessions somewhat foreshadowed the work with the Hun Hangár Ensemble, as Barnes traveled to the Romanian countryside to work with folk group Fanfare Ciocarlia. They accompanied Zach Condon on Beirut's Gulag Orkestar, too, and, though they went largely unrecognized for it, it was an indication that A Hawk and a Hacksaw was chipping back towards its source.

This latest collaboration excels in large part because it never tries to shoehorn a mood or sound into the pieces: It flows well, rocking back and forth between vibrant, danceable movements and somber, turgid instrumental numbers. The set's two horas-- a diverse class of Eastern European dances often associated with weddings-- reflect those poles. "Romanian Hora and Bulgar", recorded live last year, is spry, bells splashing out over the accordion's loping rhythm. Its second half is all frenzy, though, a heavy, exuberant, violin-led jump dashing to the audience's delight. But "Oriental Hora" shoots the same cadence through with a thick air of sobriety, a violin and viola doubling the melody until the rest of the band-- tuba, accordion, bouzouki, ukulele and Barnes' glockenspiel and steady foot percussion-- joins.

"Oriental Hora" is one of the EP's rare moments featuring more than a handful of instruments. Despite a core of six musicians and contributors including Zach Condon, the EP rarely attempts to impress with bulk sound or flashy parts. The best work here emphasizes quality not quantity, like the opening Trost composition, "Kiraly Siratás", a duet for bowed strings and the dulcimer-like cymbalom. The traditional Hungarian melodies of "Dudanotak" are played on the bagpipe by Ágoston, but Barnes lends a cantering boom-bap beat that's exuberant and charming. This music is older than both musicians, but in these hands it's got renewed swagger. Coming out of these spectacular sessions, it's more than reasonable to expect the same sort of reinvigorated vibrancy from A Hawk and a Hacksaw in the future.

-Grayson Currin, September 05, 2007

AHAAH Review On Almostcool.org

A Hawk And A Hacksaw
The Hun Hangar Ensemble
(Leaf)
Online review

Originally a member of Neutral Milk Hotel, Jeremy Barnes has been releasing Eastern-European influenced music for over half a decade now under the name A Hawk And A Hacksaw. Continuing his prolific pace of the past couple years (his The Way The Wind Blows came out last year, and his fourth full-length is expected in the relatively near future) The Hun Hangar Ensemble EP finds him teaming up with four Hungarian multi-instrumentalists for this aptly-titled mini-album. Limited to 4,000 copies, the release is eight songs and thirty minutes of what you'd expect from Barnes, with a few new wrinkles.

In addition to being joined by The Hun Hangar Ensemble, Barnes has been added Heather Trost as a full-time member of A Hawk And A Hacksaw, and the sheer density of musicians has allowed for much more elaborate arrangements on several songs of this release. After starting out with a more stripped-down track, things really get going with "Zozobra," a spastic klezmer-sounding track that finds pumping accordion mingling with drums, bagpipes, glockenspiel and a breakneck arrangement that emphasizes melody and rhythm with see-sawing effect.

"Serbian Cõcek" finds the group interpreting a traditional song with a load of bright horn arrangements while "Romanian Hora And Bulgar" is sort of a two-part track that emphasizes melancholy strings before a rowdy finale. Mixing both styles and instrumentation (as well as recording formats, with some tracks recorded live while others are studio), this eight-song set is about as varied as they come. All the songs tie together relatively well due to their influences and origins, but there's everything from "Vajdaszentivány" (a solo glockenspiel track of traditional Hungarian melodies) to the bagpipe-laced "Dudanotak."

In addition to the CD, the release comes with a DVD featuring over twenty minutes of footage from tours of the group from the past couple years that mainly acts as sort of an introduction to their music. Because of the varied nature of the songs on the release, it's hard to tell where the group will go from here. The more layered tracks (with the Hun Hangar Ensemble) are the pieces that show the most promise, so hopefully the next album from the group takes full advantage of the even more hands on deck. As mentioned above, it's strictly limited, so fans will probably want to snag this one up soon.
rating: 7.25

AHAAH Reviewed on Brianwashed.com

A Hawk and a Hacksaw and the Hun Hangar Ensemble
Written by Jonathan Dean
Sunday, 22 July 2007
Online review

This gorgeous package from the the Leaf Label contains eight songs showcasing a new collaboration between Jeremy and Heather of AHAAH, playing with a group of seasoned Hungarian musicians. Rounding out the cast are a few members of Beirut. What results is a brief but exhilarating extra-geographical jaunt through Hungarian, Serbian, Romanian and klezmer forms, as only AHAAH can produce.

At the inception of this project four years ago, one might have been justified to accuse Jeremy Barnes of a cynical kind of musical exoticization, borrowing heavily from Eastern European folk forms as a readymade repository of the surreal and evocative. For a musician who was previously best known for playing on willfully eccentric Neutral Milk Hotel and Bablicon albums, the criticism might have seemed to have some basis in reality. However, four years and several albums down the line, it is becoming much more difficult to level the accusation of audio tourism against A Hawk and a Hacksaw. Barnes, Trost, and co. have so doggedly pursued their particular soundworld that it is now impossible to see their elaboration and exploration of Slavic, Jewish, and Magyar musics as anything other than completely genuine. As the music becomes less about unorthodox cultural hybrids and more focused on faithful, spirited performances of these various cultural strands, it also loses any associations it might have once had with indie dilettantism.

I am noting all of this up front because this EP on the Leaf Label contains some of AHAAH's best recordings yet, and even though it is relatively short, it contains such a wide breadth of musical styles and moods that it might be accused of wanton eclecticism. This is very far from the case, however. Instead, this newly-extended musical collective uses their extensive knowledge of various folk musics to produce a breathlessly exciting and beautiful mini-album that is perfectly sequenced, weaving together original compositions with vigorous performances of traditional melodies. Opening with Heather Trost's composition "Kiraly Siratas," dominated by swoops of violin and the haunting tones of the cymbalom (a Hungarian dulcimer-like instrument), the atmosphere is established: joyfully dramatic, undeniably cinematic, unashamedly romantic.

"Zozobra" is the most energetic track on the EP, a fast-tempo slapstick combination of expertly played cymbalom, accordion and percussion. I've never been a dancer, but I found it difficult to resist the urge to jump out of my chair and manfiest bodily the joyful uptempo polyrhythms. "Serbian Cocek" is an ensemble piece, combining the full compositional abilities of all the musicians. Parallels will no doubt be drawn to the music of Beirut, because of the Mariachi-by-way-of-Budapest trumpets. Even with the big-band setup, the track is emotionally expressive and even impressionistic at times, an effect of the imperfect, slightly off-kilter playing. All of the performances captured here sound like just that: performances. Real human beings playing instruments, rather than clinical, surgically-edited and overdubbed studio creations. "Romanian Hora and Bulgar" is actually a live recording, but the only way that it differs from the rest of the EP is the smattering of audience noise, which merely serves to intensify the energy and drama of the performance. "Ihabibi" elaborates upon a peculiarly Balkan understanding of Arabic music, and is one of the most dynamic and beautifully textured songs on the disc. The EP ends with a trio of traditional songs, an ensemble piece ("Oriental Hora") featuring the trumpet of Zach Condon, sandwiched between two sparser pieces: one a solo on cymbalom ("Vajdaszentivany"), and the other a showcase for the Hungarian bagpipes, expertly played by Bela Agoston.

This generous set also includes a DVD featuring a 20-minute documentary about AHAAH, splicing together clips of the group in the studio and during live performances in Albequerque, in Hungary and all across the European continent. It's a very skillfully assembled set of clips that left me wanting more, but definitely clued me in to the intensity and intimacy of the AHAAH live experience, which previously I had only witnessed via the group's appearance on The Eye nearly two years ago. I have the feeling that the next full-length album from Barnes, Trost and co. is going to be a true masterpiece, if this stunning EP is any indication of the exponential growth-rate of this unique group.

AHAAH in the NY Times.

Jeff Tweedy of Wilco gives props to A Hawk and a Hacksaw in his "what I've been jamming" list for the New York times.

Online feature

A Hawk and a Hacksaw
I followed this band because Jeremy Barnes used to be in a band called Neutral Milk Hotel, and I loved their records. This group has made at least one or two other records. "A Hawk and a Hacksaw" (Leaf) was a collaboration with the Hun Hangár Ensemble. It has a cymbalon, which is like a piano played like a hammered dulcimer. I actually bought a cymbalon in Hamburg, Germany, on tour and had to find a way to ship it back home. It has a broken string, so we're still looking for someone who could repair it. I listen to a lot of folk music from around the world. I don't know the background of everyone in this group, but the music has a freshness to it. Just love that cymbalon, can't get enough of it.

AHAAH summer live dates:

07/27 Emmaboda, SWE @ Emmaboda Festival
07/29 Krems, AT @ Krems Festival
09/04 London, UK @ The Luminaire
09/05 London, UK @ The Luminaire

AHAAH & Kurihara On NPR's Weekend America.

Songs from both the new A Hawk And A Hacksaw and Michio Kurihara albums were played as bridge music on the nationally syndicated Weekend America program: Stream Broadcast.

Hurrah, The Fourth Revolver USA Podcast Is Ready For Your Listening!

On the fourth installment of the Revolver USA Podcast you can hear up and coming tracks from such righteous artist as; A Hawk And A Hacksaw and the Hun Hangar ensemble, Black Devil Disco, Blues Control, Chris De Luca vs. Phon.o, Daedelus, Dead C, Mansbestfriend, Michio Kurihara, Neurosis, and Spider Bags.

It's super easy to subscribe.

Simply go to http://web.mac.com/revolverusa

And click on the Subscribe Button (You can also hear/view them from that page as well.)

Or cut and paste the following RSS feed into iTunes' Subscribe To Podcast box (or via another podcast aggregator) :

http://rss.mac.com/revolverusa/iWeb/Revolver%20USA/revolver%20usa%20podcasts/rss.xml

Our podcasts will appear on a weekly (or whenever we can get our act together) basis featuring the latest distributed by Revolver USA. They are enhanced podcats featuring album artwork and links to various sites.