Sergei Parajanov's Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors tells the story of Ivan and Marichka, two star-crossed lovers from a tiny village in the Carpathians who find (and refind) each other under the most extraordinary circumstances. It's a vibrant, dizzying film with the quality of a dream: In 1978, the late Roger Ebert called it "one of the most unusual films I've seen, a barrage of images, music and noises, shot with such an active camera we almost need seatbelts." The movie struck a chord with Jeremy Barnes and Heather Trost of A Hawk and a Hacksaw, the American duo whose on-record explorations of the folk music of Eastern Europe shares the film's interest in the region's folk traditions, its cross-hatching of the mournful and the celebratory, and its hints of the surreal. You Have Already Gone to the Other World, produced by Deerhoof's John Dieterich and named after the film's most memorable line, is the group's sixth LP, with material both drawn from and inspired by the music in Shadows. It's a kaleidoscopic album, blending sounds from the film itself with centuries-old Ukranian, Hungarian and Romanian tunes and several new compositions that apply a few modern flourishes to the band's tradition-minded melodies.
There's not much separating Barnes and Trost's own pieces with the older material here; this is hardly their first time in the area, after all, and by now, they've studied all the guidebooks and absorbed most of the local customs. Whether it's Barnes plunking out "Where No Horse Neighs and No Crow Flies" on the santeur or Trost soaring over the title track on her violin, they've grown into remarkably lyrical players over the years, capable of great nuance and agility. Their passion for the traditional material here is obvious-- there's a palpable joy to the more boisterous stuff, a deep feeling running under the mournful material. And, whether they're using a trill from Ivan's flute as a jumping off point or starting entirely from scratch, their own compositions find ways to move the music of the film into the present without diluting it. A few judiciously applied electronic flourishes aside-- like the IDM-aware drum blowout that closes "The Sorcerer"-- the rest of this music could've easily come from Myroslav Skoryk's original score from 1964, itself a kind of hybrid of the traditional and the modern with a strong preference for the former.
That Barnes and Trost would draw an album's worth of inspiration from the musical, lyrical Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors seems obvious, but Other World, as a document of that inspiration, sometimes feels caught between a couple worlds. Barnes and Trost have played material from Other World while Shadows flickered in the background, but they're quick to point out that Other World is itself not a soundtrack. It's true that you can't quite sync one to the other, Dorothy/Dark Side-style and since Shadows already has such a rich reservoir of music running under it, they seem to want to position Other World as more addendum than replacement. Their version isn't better, they'd likely tell you-- just a little different. Taken on its own, though, the Other World LP is-- at 57 minutes and change-- a little on the long side, and while each individual piece is plenty gripping, every peak's got its valley, and all that up-and-down starts to wear on you after a while. Other World actually fares worst when you strip it of its context. Coming on the heels of 2011's stellar Cervantine, Other World feels like it might've been stronger had Trost and Barnes held a few more things back.
Shadows is, above all things, a love story, and between the grisly murders and the tender romance of the film, there's a lot of life to depict, and accordingly, a huge range of emotion to convey. By careening between joy and grief at a moment's notice, Barnes and Trost reflect the vast array of feeling at the heart of Shadows, and the music's constant motion speaks to the film's episodic nature. The few songs shared between the film and the LP-- most memorably "Wedding Theme"-- reflect the tenor of the scenes they're drawn from even without the accompanying images. And their own sharp, sinewy compositions suit the tone of the film-- dizzying, buoyed by life, yet constantly aware of death-- to a T. For all the death hovering over Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors, it's a strangely life-affirming film, a testament to the boundless passion of two souls, inexorably linked. The rapturous Other World takes that passion and turns it outward.
