Širom’s approach is contradictory. Their music is rooted in the traditional, yet never becomes a prisoner of what’s gone before. It is expansive, playful, seemingly always looking for a way to spiral upwards and outwards, into the future. The group’s preferred term for what they do is “imaginary folk”. The term was first coined by the French musicologist Serge Moreux to describe the creative approach to Hungarian traditions applied by composers like Bartók and Kodály. Like their forebears across the Pannonian Plain, Širom’s relationship to the customs and rituals of Southeast Europe is ‘idealised’, chimerical – and all the better for it.
But how do you explain Širom’s music? The sounds you hear on the band’s remarkable fifth LP come from a panoply of handmade and acoustic instruments and found objects. But in terms of form and structure, one place to start is with electronic music. That’s not as odd an idea as it may initially seem. To exaggerate just a little, if you head to an alt-folk show these days, you are likely to find part of the evening’s entertainment features a solo musician playing modular synths, using marginal changes in pitch and beat to create complexity. When this happens, it underscores how certain folk musicians operate in a similar way, especially those as steeped in improvisational music as Širom,
We’re not talking here about studio-created folktronica, but music that seems to happen in the room. Think of James Holden, an artist as preoccupied with the pastoral as Širom. Holden’s live show in support of his 2023 album, Imagine This Is A High Dimensional Space Of All Possibilities was genuinely thrilling, conveying a sense of music unfolding before you. See Širom perform live and you similarly enter a place where it feels as if anything might happen. The smallest shifts create new possibilities, changing the trajectory of the music in radical ways. But there’s another element too. There’s just something about instruments being hammered, strummed or blown that’s different, moving, human – better, even.
So long as the musicians involved know what they’re doing. Which, as fifth LP In The Wind Of Night, Hard-Fallen Incantations Whisper proves, Širom indisputably do. For anyone whose heard the trio’s previous albums, much here will be familiar – especially the insistent quality of its seven tracks. The longest of these, ‘The Hangman’s Shadow Fifteen Years On’, ominous and brooding, stretches out over close to nineteen minutes. As with much of the record, it incorporates elements of drone. But Širom aren’t playing drone music per se. The track gains coherence from an underlying pulse, akin to a pre-set element in a backing track. It’s further evidence of how experimental folk and electronic music have been backing into each other.
There’s more of an emphasis on melody here than on The Liquified Throne Of Simplicity, the album that raised the band’s international profile in 2022. Listen, for instance, to the way ‘No One’s Footsteps Deep In The Beat Of A Butterfly’s Wings’ gently takes flight around a minute in. There’s a delicacy entirely appropriate to the track’s title. Less becomes more.
In contrast, the titles of the pieces are extravagant, like the results of ramming together suggestions generated by a Cocteau Twins Random Song Title Algorithm. But these titles are also richly descriptive, suggesting the moods the tracks conjure up. ‘Tiny Dewdrop Explosions Crackling Delightfully’ sounds uncannily like a pearly morning ramble through the countryside. When it speeds up at six minutes, it’s as if Širom have suddenly started running at the sheer joy of it all.
‘Curls Upon The Neck, Ribs Upon The Mountain’ is grander, calling to mind the stark beauty of highland landscapes. The changes in the music often challenge each other, notably in the contrast between the track’s bass-rumble underpinning and strings higher up the register. A modern classical composer might use electronic effects to create a similar effect, but Širom’s approach is more organic, vital. Occasional vocals, as on ‘For You, This Eve, The Wolves Will Be Enchantingly Forsaken’, veer between warmth and yearning melancholy. The LP’s dedication to a friend, Borut Planinc, who “recently left this world” and “created several instruments for Širom”, may play a part here.
Throughout, it sounds as if Širom are playing off each other in the room, individual members either leading or waiting for the right moment to take up the reins. And yet this is a kind of fiction. The band – Samo Kutin, Ana Kravanja and Iztok Karon – have suggested in interview that you can see their recordings, which involve iteration and selection, as capturing a specific point in their experimentation rather than the process itself. They have also said they would love to re-record tracks after taking them out on the road, when the pieces have had time to go in new directions.
Does this kind of curation matter? It’s a legitimate question to ask of a band so committed to improvisation. You could usefully follow up by asking whether imaginary folk is an inherently indulgent idea. For all the band’s music makes deep connections with the past, isn’t this all rather affected? Well, yes. Partly, that’s political. Širom’s ideas around folk as a vital and evolving form implicitly challenge conservative voices trying to co-opt traditional music, an issue in parts of Eastern Europe.
But I think there’s also another important point to make here, one that can be understood by thinking about Širom’s imaginary folk as adjacent to folk horror. Taking in paganism, traditional stories, the supernatural, isolated rural settings and the naivety of city-slicker outsiders, folk horror is a rich brew. Even its finest practitioners run the risk that audiences will find what they’re reading or seeing ridiculous. In Daniel Kokotajlo’s (2023) film Starve Acre, for instance, a dead hare, no more than a sack of bones collected on an archeological dig, inexplicably regrows flesh and comes back to life as a kind of eldritch surrogate child. Folk horror dares its audience to laugh.
Live especially, Širom choose to operate in similarly perilous territory. There’s a solemnity about the way they go about creating sounds from found objects and fantastical instruments. There are parallels, incidentally, with electronic musicians focusing on twiddling a nob while music erupts around them. Think too much about the absurdity of it all and the spell may break.
That this doesn’t happen only makes Širom’s particular magic all the more impressive. Širom aren’t just drawing on the past as a way to look to the future, or using techniques employed in electronic music, or constructing playful narratives, or documenting the latest results of their improvisations, they’re doing all these things simultaneously. On their best album to date, it makes for extraordinary music, rich and rewarding. The smallest tonal shifts define the way the next moment feels.
