It’s impossible to start a story about A Hawk And A Hacksaw without remembering that once upon a time – in another life, that is – Jeremy Barnes was the drummer in Neutral Milk Hotel. I’m not pulling your references, but it was the pressure/exhaustion of being in a band that, at one point, was at the centre of a microclimate, that made him leave the United States and look for other things. He found something in European folk, especially that from the east – Hungary, Romania, Turkey – and decided to take that as his starting point. It was also a sound that aligned with the risk he had been looking for in drums until then.

The album of the same name, from 2002, can still be heard today as an explosion of the use of these sounds/references for something new. Above all, because it embraced the moment before it was: shortly afterwards Madlib’s beats albums began to arrive, flooded with sounds from a distant past-future (at the time – and still today, in part – they felt like they came from somewhere else) and the reissues (initially via Finders Keepers) invited a (re)discovery. Believe it or not, A Hawk And A Hacksaw was at the centre of it all and the rest orbited around it. Yes, Barnes was at the forefront, he was, still is, a visionary. When Heather Trost – their current partner – joined them in 2004, they harnessed their compatibility and interests and to this day have been exploring a sound that enjoys both a respect for memory and the challenge of doing it with an avant-garde flavour without any weirdness.

They’ve been challenging the modern logics and tunings that this kind of influence can promote for two decades now. They’ve been discovering new paths, creating ways for the music to continue to be heard as passionate and, above all, as part of something new and refreshing that, as much as it’s tied to folk influences, is rarely heard as ‘world music’: it doesn’t have that colonising touch. It wants to be music of causes and consequences, the sounds it explores are just a way that Barnes, first on his own and then with Trost, has found to make new ambiences possible. These were once purely rhythmic and today they are getting closer and closer to a multicoloured folk-ambient. Which, yes, still invites you to dance. AS

Bernardo is a Portuguese architect whose practice spans design, installation, photography and music. Forged in the undisciplined school of teenage rock bands, he ventures solo through the making and unmaking of riffs resembling guitars with vocabularies much more informed than his own. From the organization of space, to the organization of time, he works to explore premises of composition that allow for the creation of games where the accident is hoped-for and the result, although under-control, is always unpredictable.