Thanks to the masterpiece “The Liquified Throne of Simplicity”, Slovenian music has also been revealed to the non-lovers of the World-Music. In the meantime, the Široms have traveled wide and long, bringing their music throughout Europe, fascinating and seducing the audience with one of the most powerful mixes between tradition and avant -garde, a folk amalgam, jazz, classical and experimental music, which in affirming one's identity has elevated to universal language.
Melodic stratifications, free and archaic forms of folk musica whirlwind of ancient and new instruments, created by the same musicians with the help of natural materials: “In The Wind of Night, Hard Fallen Incantations Whisper” is all this, a delicacy already savored in the previous four records, yet once again different and unpredictable.
To open the dances is “Beteween the Fingers the Drops of Tomorrow's Dawn”, composition among the most similar to the previous album, expansive, multidimensional and above all incisive and engaging on a par with significant live performances. Change of register with “Curls Upon the Neck, Ribs Upon the Mountain”, Modular Archs and Synth viusage towards the darkness and meditation until it lapped an organized chaos, the music is intimate, suffered, a cry of pain that belongs to the earth.
For Širom folk music is not a static, but evolutionary musical form: tradition and imagination are the two declared expressive forms of a group that does not resort to intellectual logic to enhance their creations, making them flow gently, as in “Tiny Dewdrop Explosions Crackling Delightfully”.
The fifth disc of the Slovenian band is the most immediate and usable of their production but also the most melancholy and poignant. The 19 minutes of “The Hangman's Shadow Fifteen Years On” are in this sense emblematic: the human voice also becomes an instrument, dissonant melodies and bitter sounds mix with fragmented rhythmic times, between psychedelic visions and harmonic counterpoints that envelop everything. One of the most intense pages of the trio as well as one of the most innovative.
At this point it is clear that not only the music of the Širom has no equal, but each song is different and its original way. To mark the albums of the Slovenian trio is an attitude of improvisation that has rarely been granted to folk and rock musicians.
“In The Wind of Night, Hard Fallen Entancer WHISPER” is a disc characterized by extremely pagan spirituality. Those of the Slovenian trio are Avant-Folk digressions, which in their perennial dissonant structure betray the presence of influences and contaminations resulting from the wandering soul of the trio, used in creating its compositions taking refuge in the woods of their born places: Tolmino, the Carso plateau and prekmurje.
Three shorter compositions act as an argine to the long -lived and powerful sound flows mentioned above: in the six minutes of “For You, This Eve, The Wolves Will Be Enchanting”, chosen as a single presentation of the new album, the sound of the Harmonium is the access key for one of the most suggestive pages of the band, a song that as a solitary becomes tribal, in a crescendo of percussion and other instruments forged by the three musicians: The most linear song but also the most enigmatic of this new project.
The other two short episodes of the album are permeated by an agnostic sacredness: the dialogue between female voices and acoustic delights of “Hope in an all-suification space of calm” is of a disarming simplicity and naturalness, while the crystalline sounds of the three-ropes Banjo echo as a beating of wings in the delicious “no one's footsteps deep in the beat of a Butterfly's Wing ”, two intense, short compendes of an extraordinary album, the umpteenth of a band that has turned ethnic music like a sock for new unexplored creative goals.
05/10/2025
Antonio Santini for SANREMO.FM
