Location: Tolmin / Kinogledališče / Slovenia
Date: Saturday, 22.02.2020
Before heading off to France (via Italy), Širom gathered one more time on a Slovenian stage — at Tolmin’s Kinogledališče. The trio of Samo Kutin, Ana Kravanja, and Iztok Koren has put out three albums in just four years, the latest of them, “Svet, ki speče konju cvet”, back in October of last year. The title alone hints that Širom are a trio with something powerfully singular to say. Not eccentric, exactly — but undeniably experimental in their approach. Alongside the enormous musical substance the trio carries and creates, they effortlessly conjure a sense of abstraction.
Either way, this band with its fascinating geographic backstory — spanning Prekmurje, the Kras, and the Tolmin area — has stirred up considerable interest and turned heads across no small part of the Slovenian and especially the international critical press (they’re held in very high regard abroad). That’s largely down to their extraordinarily bold direction and vision: something unique that very few artists in this country have approached in a similar way. In an age when modern electronic sound manipulation is often the lever for achieving eclecticism, Širom stay firmly grounded — in acoustics, in organic tones and collages — with no hiding behind flashy effects or cosmetic production tricks. What you see and hear is what you get. Širom are an instrumental outfit; when Ana’s or Samo’s voice enters a piece, it functions as an additional sonic tool or instrument, finding melody in the moment, led by the raw present. When language surfaces in those voices, the words are improvised on the spot — whatever the musician’s immediate sense dictates in that moment of interpretation. The voice is, in the end, just another seasoning. The stage itself, before the three musicians even stepped on it, was something else entirely. The performance area was scattered with objects gathered from all corners of the world, many of them handmade at home — one-of-a-kind pieces that meaningfully reinforce the group’s self-grown, grassroots quality — and all of it hinted that we were about to encounter something absolutely out of the ordinary.
And it really was. The full concert — an hour and twenty minutes, give or take a minute less — worked as one continuous mantra that, if you know how and dare to let go, carries you far beyond the rational, into contact with an energy that logic and thought normally won’t let you near. Simply put: this music is fascinating in every way, and if you manage to switch off the ratio while it plays, you get so much more out of it — the music’s energy takes you somewhere you wouldn’t otherwise reach. That might sound strange, because the system we’ve been serving for over 2,000 years pushes us exclusively toward logic and mathematics, and in doing so we’ve completely neglected our other senses — they’ve atrophied, even though they’re still in there. Anyone who manages to reawaken them and “drift” on the wings of a given musical vibration experiences far, far more than anything school ever taught us. And this element — Širom don’t just have it; they understand it, nurture it, keep returning to it, and learn from it. For all the groundedness on display — the music is built on a strong rhythmic foundation, it stays “earthed” — that element is nonetheless internalized deep in the trio’s music, and primal feelings and instincts hover throughout the performance, always running high (on an intuitive level too).
The trio is incredibly nimble — each member handles a huge range of instruments, which demands constant mutual coordination on stage, a constant extra layer of communication that goes well beyond simply listening to each other mid-performance. Put plainly: while an individual might switch through three different instruments within a single piece, they carry in their head a rough, loose plan they move along, while also knowing the equally loose plans of the other two, so as not to turn the stage into chaos. To put it cartoonishly: so nobody headbutts each other while rapidly switching between percussion, plucked strings, bowed strings, and so on — and nobody misplaces an instrument on the far side of the stage just when they urgently need it. So the trio is switched-on at all times, even as the music conjures feelings of abstraction and transcendence, even veering into the psychedelic — and over it all, a sense of mystery. And yet it follows a thread, even though the music could easily fragment and fall apart whenever free-spinning improvisation — which always has plenty of room here — starts erasing traces of motivic structure. That only happened once during this concert, in the finale, when the band deliberately stirred up some sonic chaos with hints of free-jazz experimentation — but it was purely in service of building an atmospheric crescendo to close on. The band has also absorbed a neoclassical element, delivered above all by Ana on violin and viola. All three musicians use violin bows on their string and plucked instruments as well, which conjures additional elements of sonic strangeness and, by extension, stage theatricality.
So, for all that this is essentially a form of neo-avant-garde folk music — one that seamlessly blends with musical traditions from all corners of the globe, absorbing ethno elements and neoclassical figures — it still speaks to a kind of mystical cumulus that is, when all is said and done, thoroughly Slovenian.
The trio also uses instruments that conventionally carry melody — banjo, violin — in a percussive role (knocking on the bodies of those instruments), along with metal bowls of various sizes and other metal objects that resembled circular saw blades, which Samo used to superb sonic effect, vividly bending and warping their sound in a way that evokes something like a theremin. Then there are the other details of unusual sonic challenge that any Fred Frith would track with keen attention (or very hungry audience members, for that matter) — like scattering rice across the stage floor. If John Zorn were looking for raw sonic ethno-eclecticism, with experimentation brilliantly grafted onto its native purism of relentless bold provocation, he’d call on Širom. But take note: the band generates an enormous amount of musicality and tangible structure, and above all there is a strikingly vivid contrast between exceptional rhythmic groundedness and transcendent feats of weaving delicate sonic pastels — the brilliantly tuned interplay of multi-voice harmonies when several kalimbas are played simultaneously, with tube bells and balaphones layered in.
The end came completely out of nowhere. Too soon. Any sense of time and space had evaporated entirely in the presence of such an idiosyncratic musical vibration. Needless to say, every Širom concert is unique — and this one in Tolmin was no exception. Their pieces carry a structure of “loose reconciliation,” a kind of “map” that invites a symbiosis of free-spirited sonic connections, basic orientating points of departure, while within that “gentle orientational map” the trio always leaves enough room for experimentation that the intuitive sensuality of the trio’s in-the-moment “mantras” can freely take shape in performance — and that is one of the essential building blocks of Širom’s music. On this evening in Tolmin it expressed itself uniquely and unrepeatable, just as it would express itself completely differently at any other location — especially in contact with a fully natural environment. Outside, that is, where there are no roofs over our heads and no concrete around us.
author: Aleš Podbrežnik
photographs: Aleš Podbrežnik
