Volume 8

+++ Release Date: 5th February +++

A HAWK AND A HACKSAW

‘Volume 8’

Inspired by folk music traditions which transcended both borders and language, Jeremy Barnes (of Neutral Milk Hotel) formed A Hawk and a Hacksaw in 2002. The project truly blossomed when Barnes met his partner in music and life, Heather Trost in 2004 - a relationship which began with a conversation about Bela Bartok. The couple went on to make seven albums in which they’ve explored their ardour for music from Northern Romania through the Balkans to Turkey, collaborating with artists such as Cüneyt Septiçi, the brass band Fanfare Ciocârlia and film director Peter Strickland among others whilst touring the world many times over.

The couple had been taking a break from A Hawk and a Hacksaw over the last few years to work on other projects (Jeremy with solo albums under the name Human Error and Albuquerque Radiophonic Workshop, alongside his work with incarcerated teens and refugee youth in Albuquerque, Heather with her projects Agistri (on LM Duplication) Petrichor (Third Man) and Desert Flowers (Bada Bing). They continued playing weddings, learning tunes and writing, but didn't see the need to release music. However, as Jeremy notes: “A couple things happened in 2026 that made me want to document what we have been doing more formally and to go out and tour again”. Heather adds: “After all the war and atrocities that have been happening in Ukraine, Palestine, and Iran it felt we needed to say something through our music.”

The result is Volume 8, their first release for Rocket Recordings, and an album which takes an uplifting universality of spirit and marries it to a cathartic rawness, flourishing in an electrifying celebratory passion free of both time and place. Here the couple play all the instruments on this record, save for exquisite choral vocals by the Sevda Choir - from traditional instrumentation like the Iranian santur and Turkish Yaylı Tanbur to violin and organ along with percussion like the tapan and riq – and recorded the album in a startling four days at Sonic Ranch in Tornillo, Texas.

Imbued with the psychic charge of the here and now, they pay respectful tribute to the music they're essaying and interpreting, whilst also finding space for fertile experimentation and wild abandon. The invigorating, drone-inflected Gayda, to name but one, sees a bagpipe melody often heard at Turkish and Kurdish/Armenian wedding ceremonies arranged for distorted violin and tapan drum to uniquely in-the-red, mantric and cathartic effect, resplendent in its collision of celebratory joy and transcendent noise

Yet whilst Turkish music heavily influenced Volume 8 – as with traditional material like the haunting Ne Yalan Soyleyeyim – and the music of A Hawk and a Hacksaw often reflects the music of the former Ottoman Empire (the band's principle area of influence), both of the latter are stubbornly resistant to being pigeonholed or constrained in convenient boundaries “Many of the traditional songs we recorded, like Gayda and Lorke, Lorke are incredibly old, probably pre-Christian and considered Kurdish or Turkish or Armenian depending on who you ask” reflects Jeremy. “Some of our influences have moved further back in time, but the geographic areas are the same." Bookending the album are two tracks which sum up the universal and spiritually altruistic vision of Volume 8. The opening song Beloved forms a kind of call to arms, inspired by what Heather describes as a mystical experience visiting Dar al Islam, historic adobe mosque in northern New Mexico. “There we met a wonderful Lebanese American man named Marwan. He welcomed us as family, even though we were strangers to him. It was in this spirit of being treated with such care and warmth by a complete stranger that inspired the lyrics for this song - that one day all humans will be free and we’ll no longer be divided.”

Jeremy adds “I think back to when I was five years old; the house next to mine went up for rent, and a family moved in who had just come over from Iran. They had a boy who was a bit older than me and although he didn't speak English, we became best friends, and they treated me like family. All of my life I have been fortunate to have experiences like that; meeting and becoming close to people and being thrown into their cultural milieu, and that opportunity comes when people say no to tribalism and nationalism.”

The closing song ‘Yes, We Love You’ operates as both as a statement of intent and as a kind of answer song in kind to the 1978 Lebanese pop hit ‘Do You Love Me’ by the Bendaly Family. “We love that song, and when I am hearing it I’m hearing someone ask a much broader question, not a request for romantic love, but for broader, universal love and acknowledgement.” says Jeremy “We wrote a response to it: "Yes, we love you." We love your culture, we admire you and we believe you should be safe, your humanity and culture should be respected. This is a message to the entire Muslim world: We love you, we need you.”

Hence to paraphrase a spiritual leader past; if there is a method to a A Hawk and a Hacksaw’s Volume 8, its foundation is love.

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