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…