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	COLLEEN + A HAWK AND A HACKSAW Indie-rock recital?

The young woman on stage sat meekly tapping the top of the acoustic guitar in her lap, stopping at irregular intervals to adjust her array of effects pedals. I figured this was some sort of pre-gig tuning ritual for the artist known as Colleen (a/k/a the French-born Cécile Schott), so I continued my conversation with the US representative of the European label Leaf, who’d come along on this seven-gig tour of the Northeast to work the merch table and who’d just given me a deal on the first two releases by another Leaf artist, A Hawk and A Hacksaw, unaware that the 81 persons who’d paid at the door of P.A.’s Lounge in Union Square last Friday had already begun to sit on what appeared to be assigned spots on the floor. So I got shushed. Inman Square’s Zeitgeist Gallery — usual home to the sort of avant-garde instrumental manipulations Colleen was engaged in — had moved south a few blocks for the evening, and there I was, standing like a fool, now doing my best to catch the subtleties of the dulcet, bell-like tones emanating from Colleen’s guitar as the air conditioner in the corner threatened to overwhelm her.

This is usually the point at which the artist, with full support from the audience, requests that the air conditioner be turned off in spite of the humid August heat. Colleen didn’t go there, which won me over for a few minutes. And once she moved on to bow a cello, I was at least able to make out what her press bio describes as the "17th-century compositions for viola da gamba" she’d recently begun to "pick up on."

But my main reason for being there was Jeremy Barnes, one of singer-songwriter Jeff Mangum’s multi-instrumental collaborators in the great ’90s indie band Neutral Milk Hotel. Allied with the lo-fi, ’60s-loving Elephant 6 clique led by Apples in Stereo and Olivia Tremor Control, NMH set Mangum’s Dylanesque ravings against a carnivalesque backdrop of fuzzy guitars, raucous drumming, and everything from trumpet and trombone blasts to the whoosh of accordion.

With A Hawk and a Hacksaw (think Hamlet’s "I know a hawk from a handsaw"), Barnes applied Reichian repetition and backwards looping to accordion riffs and found sounds on a homonymous 2004 Leaf debut before traveling to Europe to soak up the mélange of folk musics he mimics playfully on the new Darkness at Noon. Joined on stage by violinist Heather Trost, the bearded Barnes sat behind a makeshift drum kit with four pedals cradling a giant accordion in his arms and wearing a wool hat adorned with bells and a drumstick he used to tap a cymbal by jerking his head to the right. It was an impressive if amusing display of one-man-bandsmanship, and the set was lively enough to bring the crowd to their feet for a time. But without a frontman like Mangum, it was still a bit too much like a recital for my taste.