A Hawk And A Hacksaw's Ecstatic New Album
This week’s Check Ahead is from the band A Hawk and a Hacksaw. The New Mexico-based folk duo of Heather Trost and Jeremy Barnes has built its reputation on performing music that is rooted in Eastern European folk traditions. And as Barnes tells us, their new album, You Have Already Gone To The Other World, (out Apr. 2), draws inspiration from a 1964 Soviet film from Sergei Parajanov called Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors. You can listen to the ecstatic You Have Already Gone To The Other World in full over here, in Check Ahead.
On the album concept:
A few years ago we decided to do a reworking of the soundtrack to the film Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors. We took it on tour in Europe a few times, and did a few film festivals here and there. All the while we were recording at home -- thinking about the meaning of film and the story lines. Some of the songs are directly influenced by the film, others are inspired [by it]. The film inspired us to go to new directions that we hadn't been to before. Paradjanov's vision and the way he put this film together is amazing -- to be honest, it infested my dreams.
On the original film music:
A lot of the music in the film is beautiful folk music from the Hutsul tribe -- of people who live up in the Carpathian Mountains. It's utterly beautiful, and was an inspiration. Some parts of the film was recorded in a studio in Moscow. I wasn't as fond of that -- a kind of '60s orchestra with trumpet and strings. It occurred to me -- what if we reworked this.
On Sergei Paradjanov:
This film is so psychedelic it is amazing. It was made in 1963, but the techniques that they used are incredible. I don't know how it got through the censors. I think it was censored in the beginning, and it had a lot of popularity outside the Soviet Union. Paradjanov was Armenian working in the Soviet Union, creating a story about the Hutsuls at a time when people were supposed to be talking about the Soviet Union, not about tiny ethnic minorities. Nobody in the Russian socialist realism art scene wanted to talk about the Hutsuls -- but he did go through a lot of pain and difficulty.
