A Hawk And A Hacksaw - dromNYC.com

A Hawk and A Hacksaw
A broomstick and duct tape. That is what the curious Americans used for a mic stand. In a humble house with no running water deep in the Romanian hinterland, they were recording with Fanfare Ciocarlia, one of the world’s top brass bands. A Hawk and A Hacksaw have also found themselves playing with Roma on the streets of Amsterdam and out on the Jaffa road, performing to both Hassids and Palestinians; in a sculptor’s tree house outside of Budapest; and at a Jewish wedding in Pittsburgh where a young boy stared transfixed at the band, ignoring the party revelers, until—with no explanation—tears streamed down his face.

Check out the music that ilicited such emotion as A Hawk and a Hacksaw tour the US starting in late July in Santa Fe, wending through the Midwest to the east coast, hitting Chicago, St. Louis, Baltimore, New York, and a stop in Asbury Park for All Tomorrow’s Parties.

On first glance, the desert mountains of New Mexico don’t seem like an obvious home for a band that specializes in its own blend of music from the former Yugoslavia, Greece, Turkey, and Romania. But there is more to the connection than the untrained eye can see. On the album’s title track, the group explores the mariachi influence on Romany brass that flourished thanks to the Latin American soap operas popular across Eastern Europe. “Europeans inspired Mexican brass and now Mexican brass inspired Europeans,” says band founder, accordionist, and percussionist Jeremy Barnes. “In New Mexico, we grew up hearing all this brass music, hearing mariachis.”

There is something connecting what may seem like distant points on the map: The Balkans and New Mexico, thanks to an odd tie Barnes and band mate and violinist Heather Trost felt on their travels. “Northern New Mexico is a beautiful ecosystem of cultural clashes and mixings, that really remind us of the Balkans and Transylvania,” says Trost. “There are very few ‘cultural climates’ like this in the world, and I think it's something we try to reflect in our songs.”

Whereas other American groups are simply “from the U.S.,” when AHAAH tour in Europe, they are often promoted as being from New Mexico. Many Europeans think that New Mexico is its own nation, and sometimes I wish it was. It often feels that way,” says Barnes.

While the music comes off sounding rooted and traditional, the treatments simultaneously evoke specific places while bending time. AHAAH uses an old two-track recorder to give their recordings a timelessness; suggesting a historic feel deep in memory, even though the compositions are new or arranged in entirely new ways.

The piece titled “Española Kolo” evokes the kolo, or “circle,” the national dance of the former Yugoslavia, with the ambience of a New Mexico town. “It’s an area with a bad reputation,” says Barnes. But beyond that façade is a town and river valley with a completely unique culture. There are lots of low riders and they are proud of their identity. “Many New Mexicans are afraid to visit Española, just as many Europeans won’t go to Serbia. I thought we should pay homage to the good that comes from both places,” says Barnes. “A lot of these Serbian songs have completely Mexican melodies over the top of a kolo. Sometimes we get the reaction ‘You’re from New Mexico; what are you doing playing this music from Eastern Europe?!’ But there is a connection to be made”.

The AHAAH sound reached many a listener’s ear when they recorded with Beirut on the breakout album Gulag Orkestar in 2006, but their subsequent three recordings (and new album CERVANTINE in particular) is a move further East- to the asymmetric rhythms of Macedonia, Bulgaria, and Greece. On “No Rest for the Wicked,” listeners may have trouble distinguishing certain accordion melodies from electronics, or may become intrigued by the desolate sounding string-on-string Roma violin trick that closes the track.

Elsewhere on “Mana Thelo Enan Andra,” listeners are treated to an outsider’s view that breaks down barriers between nationalist distinctions between Greek and Turkish music. The song features the rembetika stylings of Chris “Papalazerescu” Hladowski’s Greek bouzouki (lute) and Issa Malluf’s Turkish doumbek, alongside the voice of Stephanie Hladowski. ”She sounds like she could be from the Smyrna, singing in the 1920s, I don’t know how she does it.”

When AHAAH play big cities like New York, expect to see a cross-section of Central and Eastern Europe represented in the audience. The Turks will sing along to the classic song “Uskudar,” whose melody has traveled from country to country, so others will hum along too. “It turns up in Greece, in Bosnia, and elsewhere. And as a Klezmer tune, it’s called ‘A Terk in America,’” says Barnes.

A Hawk and a Hacksaw have never been about ethnographic reenactment or folk purity. “We want people to explore further after they hear us,” Trost reflects. “We’re doing what we love, and we want people to like it on its own terms. People are hungry for things beyond Western pop and we are a part of that exploratory process.”

“So ebullient and full of character that by the time it’s over you feel like you’ve caught a glimpse of the type of joyful festivity that always feels most rewarding after a long journey” – Pitchfork

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Dark Dark Dark
Listeners everywhere are having a very emotional response to Dark Dark Dark's music. Their sophomore album, titled Wild Go, is ambitious and layered, welcoming and familiar, and reminds us to seek out the wonder and magic that surround us all the time. Their sound sets Nona Marie Invie's soaring, haunted voice against an array of traditional instruments, balancing folk and high-art, creating music that is making people crazy.

The 10-song collection is a marked evolution for the group, which began in 2006 as a collaboration between Minneapolis based musicians Nona Marie Invie and Marshall LaCount. These two songwriters bring together disparate influences including minimalism, New Orleans jazz, Americana, Eastern European folk, and pop. Using stark contrast in texture, tone and imagery, the band has expanded and redefined their sound for the new album.

Wild Go's first single "Daydreaming" features Invie's warm voice and piano supported by spare, clean drums, guitar with lush reverb, cascades of dirty, distorted banjo, and an accordion wandering through the harmonies. The landscape created by the instruments reflects the one traveled by Invie - "I've been touring for so long now – and it's been great," she says, "but I have this internal conflict between having a nomadic lifestyle and needing a home."

In the studio the band worked with producer Tom Herbers (a Minneapolis stalwart known for his credits with the Jayhawks, Low, and Soul Asylum), recording live to tape at three different Minneapolis locations, including a renovated church/studio and an old theater. Of all the influences on Wild Go, perhaps the greatest is their dedication to live performance and touring, where many of Dark Dark Dark's songs first come to life. Playing together, the band lifts Invie and LaCount's songs to another level.

"We try to create a magical space with our performances," Invie says. "I'm always blown away by the number of people that come up to me afterward and say how much the music touched them. I love it when people can dance and have fun at our shows, but it's when people are quiet and I can tell that they are feeling it on a personal level that I feel like I'm really connecting."

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Pillars and Tongues
Once based entirely in Chicago, and now in near-constant motion, PILLARS AND TONGUES is a formidable force, large and looming, whose musical pursuits defy genre categorization. The ongoing result of these pursuits has been called, variously, "holy" and "sexy" and it may well be the tension between these two concepts which lights the fire under (over?) Pillars and Tongues. Think on those things which are so beautiful they become obscene.

Speaking literally, the trio makes extended use of the human voice, violin, double bass, drums, bells and organs. The music is perhaps distinctly American in both its affair with American forms and its refusal to adhere to them at all. Heavily melodic, rolling, desert drones permeate the music of Pillars and Tongues, rendering the listener captive to deeply hypnotic vibes punctuated by heavy, danceable and almost tribal, rhythms. "It’s difficult to talk about influences or genres with Pillars and Tongues, and almost as hard to talk about their sound" writes Jason Crock for Pitchfork. This is evident, as the band has drawn comparisons to everything from Dead Can Dance and Peter Gabriel to Godspeed you! Black Emperor to Arvo Pärt to John Fahey.

In the past three years, the group has released a handful of limited recordings on several American boutique labels, as well as three full-length releases. One with Chicago's Contraphonic label and the following two on San Francisco's Empty Cellar label. The trio of Mark Trecka, Beth Remis, and Evan Hydzik has variously undergone expansion to a quartet with the addition of Ben Babbitt and also seen variations on the trio form. In whichever formation Pillars and Tongues takes, when just right, their voices and instruments blend like the reeds of a pipe organ to create something that is altogether far greater than the sum of their parts. This sort of alchemy is just the type of thing they have been honing for the past few years, accepting invitations to tour as support for Bonnie "Prince" Billy and Joan of Arc, opening for Dirty Three with Nick Cave, Bill Callahan, Daniel Higgs, Sir Richard Bishop, Red Red Meat, etc., and performing hundreds of concerts in various other scenarios from basements to cathedrals, from Albuquerque to Lisbon.

"With just three members, Pillars and Tongues manages to craft powerful folk abstractions and interwoven, trance-inducing vocal dynamics. Both composed and improvisational, these shifting forms evoke spiritual vibes in their soulful essence, heavenly harmonies, and repeated patterns."
–- Alarm Magazine, “This Weeks Best Albums

"Recording much of their material live, their antecedents are as modern as drone and as old as early American folk, though with the latter they’re often stretching the definition of the genre [. . .] it’s hard to believe Lay of Pilgrim Park is the work of just three people in the same room, and their roles are so fluid it’s hard to pick out where one member’s contributions start and another ends. The album’s abrupt changes, deliberate silences, and movements rather than verses and choruses feel almost more classical than folk (or jazz, or indie, or anything else they might be considered) [. . .] a tightly focused album-length piece"
– Jason Crock, Pitchfork

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