ŠIROM - A Universe That Roasts Blossoms For A Horse - LP

Slovenian artificers of genuinely strange music, Širom describe their sound as imaginary folk … A puzzling trip into some very peculiar sonic regions where nothing is quite as it seems.” 
-- The Wire

There’s a sequence in Memoryscapes, a lovely French-made short film, in which Širom set about fashioning music from a pile of pots, pans, saucepan lids and empty cans of supermarket lager on the kitchen table. It’s the band in microcosm: cracked, insistent beats, rhythm chasing rhythm, a deadly serious playfulness, and the intimacy of close friendship undercut by the sense of emergency of a flashing torch. Širom are all about the head and the hand, and the dark that always pushes against the light. We’re around another kitchen table now, and the three members of the band – Ana Kravanja, Samo Kutin, and Iztok Koren, in any order you like for this is a collective endeavor – are gently fending off any question that attempts to reduce their music to type. It’s not the first time they’ve had to suffer a conversation like this since their highly acclaimed second record, I Can Be A Clay Snapper, became one of tak:til’s first releases two years ago. ‘Imaginary folk’ is Samo’s preferred description, but the word ‘preferred’ is doing some heavy lifting here. You get the sense that the band doesn’t much care for labels. ‘It’s also good not to know everything,’ he says. ‘We don’t want to play something that sounds like it already exists.’ (Although fans of psych, outernational field recordings, folk horror, Don Cherry’s Organic Music Society, Rileyesque minimalism or mutant country might find a home, however fleeting, in Širom’s world.)