A Hawk and a Hacksaw at Sister

By Zach Ulibarri

Anyone who walked into the music side of Sister on a whim this past Friday might have been in for just a bit of a surprise. No, it wasn't an assault of noise from Wolf Eyes or Chat Pile or the frenetic energy of Boris, but rather the Eurasian smörgåsbord of whatever the hell local ABQ act A Hawk and a Hacksaw even is. 

Founder Jeremy Barnes is perhaps best known as the drummer of legendary indie rock band Neutral Milk Hotel, but tonight the Albuquerque good-old-boy performed with his long-time collaborator, wife, and Albuquerque good-old-girl Heather Trost as the inimitable A Hawk and a Hacksaw duo. Trost is, for that matter, known mostly (to me at least) for her solo work, such as the magnificent album Petrichor, but she has also worked with Swans on Leaving Meaning and other ABQ bands FOMA and Beirut (the latter of them with Barnes).

The night started in what I guess we'll call classic form for the band, which is to say there was an hour or so of found (?) footage in the form of a curated film called Love in the Time of Ceaușescu: VHS Footage of Balkan Weddings in the 1980s. The subtitle itself perfectly encapsulates the film's contents, as it indeed was a collection of blurry dancers, drummers, and brass players making all manner of southeastern European musics as they celebrated the bonding of young lovers. The eagle-eyed amongst the crowd likely saw Barnes grinning from ear-to-ear looking not at the projection of the film onto the brick wall, but onto the laptop from which the video was cast. Truly, on his face one could see the look of a man awash in a utopia of his own creation as he regaled us with his far-flung, hard-sought-after tunes that, admittedly, slapped [1].

At the film's conclusion, Santa Fe-based Eastern European choir Sevda took to the stage with a collection of ethereal Balkan vocal pieces. Starting with Georgian tunes and going (both ways, mind you) around the Black Sea to Ukraine and beyond to outliers as far as Croatia and Latvia, Sevda harmonized such they that overpowered the literal brick box acoustics of Sister Bar to sound as if they were in a more fitting locale, like a cathedral. The audience quite appropriately lost their shit a few songs in as the epic assembly of voices came together time and again, but especially when it was announced that the group would sing "Izlel ye Delyo Haydutin," a Bulgarian song that was included on the Voyager 1 and 2 Golden Records [2] about seeking freedom from the grip of the Ottoman Empire. One of the singers also asked the audience if they saw the anti-ICE protest outside. Upon receiving a positive reply, she then announced that the entire set was also an anti-ICE protest, which drew yet more applause.

A Hawk and a Hacksaw finally came to the stage with Trost on violin and Barnes on the Iranian santur, a 2700 year old instrument that features no less than 72 strings [5]. Upon taking the stage, Barnes made a heartfelt call for the well-being of the Iranian people given the chaos that was engulfing that nation, even before this weekend’s escalation. 

He then proceeded to kick the night off with the santur equivalent of a facemelter. Trost soon joined in with the violin for a few instrumental songs before she added her haunting voice to a few tunes. At this point, the audience, which included a few older hippies who evidently brought in their own lawn chairs to chill out on without protest from the Sister Bar staff, was still in a comparatively low-energy state.

That soon changed when Trost brought out the Stroh violin (a concoction of a violin with an amplifying brass horn atop it). Barnes had by then switched to the accordion, and the crowd's energy noticeably began to intensify as the night went on.

At some point Barnes noted that, despite the wintery mix outside, the AC was on and that he and Trost were quite cold on stage. Barnes first asked the Sister staff if it were possible to raise the thermostat, but he then noted that the thermostat itself was behind a lucky fan, who he then commanded to take matters into their own hands. 

That an acoustic Balkan folk set devolved in media res into HVAC negotiations (with Barnes praising the thermostat-adjuster for "grasping the means of production" while a bunch of fucking Burqueños watched from lawn chairs that they'd brought from home) is the kind of shit this humble photographer cannot make up.

The crowd was already starting to get worked into a dancing frenzy, and then Trost began to distort her violin. For one song, Trost seemed to be pulling a thread over the strings of her violin to produce a jittery, scratching sound that she nonetheless modulated and tuned as if it were a typical and harmonious chord. Barnes abandoned his accordion to return to his roots with a single clear drum. The pounding beats and distorted sounds at first evoked a classical Persian song, but Trost's playing soon devolved into something that wouldn't entirely seem out of place at a noise show.

The writhing mass of dancers at the front of the stage soon grasped hands and went full circle, both in the literal sense (in that they formed a giant Hora ring dance entrapping less enthusiastic attendees in the center of a spinning drunken mass) and in the figurative sense (in that they brought us back to the insanity of the Balkan wedding music that had kickstarted the night). It was us now who had become the frothing, sweaty vortex that had replaced the blurry, low-framerate wedding visages from 40 years ago, and the eagle-eyed would again spy Barnes grinning from ear-to-ear upon his works as we danced below him and Trost.

5/5, would Hawk and Hacksaw again.

P.S., The first time I saw A Hawk and a Hacksaw was approximately ten years ago. While I had known of them vaguely by way of Neutral Milk Hotel, it was my then-best friend Juan Carlos Romero who had dragged me to the house show that they played at, which I feel like was in Barelas, but I don't really remember. Juan was murdered in 2017, and I miss him very much.

[1] Fans who have had one cup too many of the Neutral Milk Hotel Kool-Aid might note that the music on display was at once nothing like and yet entirely reminiscent of frontman Jeff Mangum's famous (?) Bulgarian Field Recordings Vol. 1.

[2] Alas, as a physicist who works in planetary science for a day job, I must take issue with Sevda's description of the recording. Firstly, they didn't even say the word "Voyager," and they instead made a vague reference to "that gold record that was sent into space." They also mentioned it being launched "into the stratosphere." The pedant in me must make clear that both (because there were two) Golden Records went well beyond the stratosphere into the mesosphere and then into the thermosphere and then into the exosphere, whence they finally entered what we call 'space' before they did something actually kinda impressive in that they became the literal only things from humanity that have left our solar system to enter the interstellar medium [3]. Voyager 2 remains the only spacecraft to have visited the ice giants, Uranus and Neptune [4]. In 296,000 years, if no one fucks with it, Voyager 2 will pass within 4 light years (which is actually pretty close in universe terms) of Sirius, the brightest star in the night sky.

[3] Fun fact for all you goddamn nerds! NASA recently launched the Interstellar Mapping and Probe (IMAP) mission, which will carry the Interstellar Dust Experiment (IDEX) instrument. IDEX will, in a matter of months, collect more interstellar material than the sum total of all previous spacecraft missions! Isn't science fun?

[4] FYI, that hopefully won't be true for too much longer. A bunch of other nerds are trying to probe Uranus. But I’m trying to go looking for signs of bacterial alien life at Uranus’s moon Ariel.

[5] The santur is found in Assyrian and Babylonian carvings dating back to at least 669 BC.