Forest Bathing is the new album from A Hawk & A Hacksaw, the New Mexico duo of Heather Trost and Jeremy Barnes. Ahead of its release next month, premiering above, we have a video for ‘The Magic Spring’ which features on the album.
The video is directed by Peter Strickland, whose past credits include direction on The Duke of Burgundy and Bjork’s 2014 live video for her Biophilia album. It centres around old, black-and-white film footage which accompanies the duo’s string-led melancholia.
‘Forest bathing’ is a term that means "taking in the forest atmosphere", and it was developed in Japan during the 1980s going on to become a cornerstone of healing in Japanese medicine. This idea of taking in the forest atmosphere became a key inspiration for Trost and Barnes while working on the album, taking the Valle De Oro National Wildlife Refuge in New Mexico as their forest of choice.
While the bulk of the music on Forest Bathing is played by the duo, they have also enlisted guest performers, such as Turkish clarinet player Cüneyt Sepetçi, Hungarian cimbalom player Unger Balász, Chicago trumpeter Sam Johnson, Deerhoof’s John Dieterich and Noah Martinez of the band Lone Piñon.
The album was produced across an extended period of time, and also took in inspiration from travel made by the duo to countries like Bulgaria, Albania, Turkey, Greece and Romania. They will tour the album through the rest of this year, and you can find the list of dates place the text you want as hyperlink here.
Forest Bathing is out on April 13 via Living Music Duplication.
