The music made by Heather Trost and Jeremy Barnes — the two members of A Hawk and A Hacksaw — isn’t the most accessible to mainstream music fans.

Those who turn to Top 40 radio during morning drive time would likely find the band’s music as alien to their ears as a Romanian Gypsy would if he was forced to listen to Justin Bieber. But for those with a more broadminded palate, A Hawk and A Hacksaw provides a sonic bridge between the folk traditions of Eastern Europe and the adventuresome spirit of America.

“When I first heard music from Romania, it completely blew me away,” Barnes told The Daily Times during a recent interview. “I thought, ‘Wow; this is it — I want to base what I do on this sound. There are some people who hear it and have the same feeling, and then there are other people who hear it and think, ‘Oh my God, I can’t hear this anymore; it’s driving me crazy.’ We appeal to the first group.”

At one time, Edwards was a part of that first group. The former drummer for acclaimed indie band Neutral Milk Hotel, he discovered the music and culture of Eastern Europe while living in Chicago, where his residence in a neighborhood filled with immigrants from the Ukraine, Serbia, Poland and Hungary opened his eyes and ears to folk traditions that originated far beyond American shores.

An impulse purchase of a Romanian vinyl album released on the Communist State label sent him on a quest to discover everything he could about those traditions, from the influences of the Ottoman Empire to Hungarian folk sounds. He traveled to Europe and lived there for five years, and upon returning to the United States, he landed in Albuquerque, N.M., where he met fellow musician Heather Trost.

At the time, she was studying music and playing in local clubs; they bonded over a shared love of Bartok and Balkan influences and began performing together almost immediately. The band’s self-titled debut was released in 2002; other albums followed, each heavy on instrumentals and sparse on vocals. There’s a primal, tribal feel to the band’s music, which is about as far removed from rock ‘n’ roll, at least in terms of composition, as Ottawa is from Key West. The energy, however, is altogether similar.

When Trost and Barnes perform, the rhythmic beats and whirling melodies take on a life of their own, bringing to life a culture that seems foreign on the surface but isn’t really so different from our own, Barnes said.

“If anything, our going home, back to New Mexico, gives the (new) album (“Cervantine”) a sense of place that reflects on where we’re from,” Barnes said. “A lot of the songs on there we wrote are getting closer to something, I guess. It’s not to copy these songs; even when we do traditional songs, we try to arrange them and change them and make them our own.

“We don’t want to be a cover band. There are two ways of looking at folk music — as something to be preserved in a museum, or as something to be kept alive. What we’re aiming for is to evolve and be a part of this idea as folk music as a living thing.”

In treating it as such, he and Trost have also learned a few things about themselves and the way they live their lives. The music is so richly tribal, so anchored to a particular place — be it a village or a country or even a family — that it changed the way he thought about his own roots, or lack thereof.

“It changed the way I live and the way I think about and play music,” he said. “It made me consider my home and my family and what I want to do with my life. Before, I was a vagabond who wandered around, never having anywhere I could truly consider my home. Now, I think about things like growing vegetables and having a little space of my own. It made me value my home a lot more, and it’s interesting to have to go that far to get that feeling.”