Darkness at Noon

In the past year, Jeremy Barnes has lived in England, Prague and New Mexico, gradually gathering the many instruments, musicians, and ethnographies that appear on the new album by A Hawk And A Hacksaw. Recorded in a British church and in an Albuquerque dance studio, Darkness At Noon breathes life from the cultures through which it travels. Barnes expands AHAAH with an orchestra of accordion, harp, oud, Turkish cumbus, and jaw harp. A reverential madman, he drops an impassioned bomb on traditional structures, mines through the wreckage and reassembles pieces with the attentive care given to holy relics. AHAAH doesn't break from musical history as much as sing its essential values in wholly new forms.