For years I have been fascinated by the music of Širom and and have thought about the best way to describe them; however, I’ve always been intimidated by the apparent inadequacy of the usual terminology used to talk about music, by the risk of becoming entangled in cryptic or overly rhetorical phrases, and by the risk of demeaning their value by using labels and genres as patches in a narrative full holes due to a lack of the right words.
On the evening of February 26th at Biko in Milan, the concert, and especially the sight of the stage set up, represented a sort of epiphany: the venue’s stage was full as I’ve rarely, if ever, seen it before.
Every space, save for a few “holes” left to allow the musicians to jump from one side to the other like musical acrobats, was occupied by instruments of all kinds, with no discernible pattern: string instruments lying on the ground next to a harmonium leaning against a small bass drum, homemade percussion instruments and bells of all kinds, cymbals next to a row of xylophones. An apparent chaos that perfectly represents the founding core of Širom’s music, amely a poetics that seeks to embrace musical flow and energy starting from universal popular culture, an anima mundi that surrounds us and vibrates in their music in the form of strings plucked or strummed by primordial bows, drum skins, found objects, and ancestral voices.
Seeing Širom move from one instrument to another doesn’t suggest an attempt to impose structure on the apparent disorder of nature through a form that is codified and comprehensible to humans, such as music, but rather a desire to provide the only possible representation of this disorder, abandoning oneself to it and capturing its most intimate and transitory nature. In fact, one gets the impression that Širom’s music is able to capture and crystallize something pre-existing, which the trio interprets and disseminates, conveying it through their instruments, ultimately documenting something that often escapes us in its fleetingness.
And the concert, therefore, is much more than a simple performance, but a moment of sharing the common condition of being alive and of transcending one’s individuality towards the whole.
The setlist is formally divided into three very long sections with tracks taken from the latest fabulous album, In The Wind Of Night Hard Fallen Incantations Whisper, in a subdivision that, however, loses its meaning within the overall flow.
The choice of the album title is not accidental, particularly the term ‘incantations’, which perfectly suits the music of the Slovenian trio and represents, as explained by one of the group’s members, Samo Kutin, an attempt to bring something good and precious into the world. And if the album perfectly embodies this intention, without, however, becoming fixated on celestial music with incantations that sometimes become dark enchantments representing even the darkest aspects of being, the live dimension further amplifies the vital energy of the music, which is already extraordinary on the record.
The audience’s long applause, which seemed to go on forever, before the encore, which for once was condensed into something closer to a song, confirmed that, thanks also to the intimate atmosphere of Biko’s living room, musicians and spectators had managed to align themselves with the same inner vibration; something that only great artists, capable of drawing on a deep source beyond rational and human understanding, can achieve.
