Expansive, free-form, handmade and improvised, the extravagantly-titled The Liquified Throne of Simplicity is the fourth album from this freewheeling Slovenian trio of multi-instrumentalists. They forage among the world’s musics as well as their own, making their own handmade instruments, and creating huge tracks redolent of a borderless musical world where the guembri rhythms of the opening 20-minute track, “Wilted Superstition Engaged in Copulation”, ring and resonate with the sound of chimes, balafon, ocorina flute, ribab and viola, the peeling Egyptian double-reeded mizmar, plus "various objects", and "acoustic resonators".
Striking passages rise up and sink back into the fluid depths of the whole, reminiscent in its own way of the ways Miles Davis directed operations for Bitch’s Brew or Jon Hassall’s Fourth World musical explorations. Drawing on a range of global styles, European folk and acoustic psychedelia, Sirom’s semi-imaginary realm spans time and space for inspiration, but it’s rooted in the Slovenian topographical imagination of forests and mountains, of springs, streams and caves, of Slovenia’s chequered history, flecked by the passages of Roman, Byzantine and Austro-Hungarian empires.
Opening up and folding in those kinds of histories and topographies is what Sirom’s music is about, its depth of field shimmering into a kind of aural hypnogogia on the second, 16-minute track, “Grazes, Wrinkles, Drifts into Sleep”. For long periods it's a duet between balafon and viola, before a warm front of otherworldly chimes and drones – there’s a hurdy-gurdy grinding its corn somewhere deep within – fuels the track to rise and take off into acoustic, folkloric astral realms. There are moments of meander, but as a whole it’s a profoundly engaging and absorbing sound trip, and Sirom’s members – Ana Kravanja (viola, daf, ocarinas, mizmar, balafon, ribab), Iztok Koren (guembri, banjos, balafon, percussion) and Samo Kutin (hurdy gurdy, Slovenian lutes, balafon, frame drum, ocarina, acoustic resonators) are your masterful guides. You’re advised not to operate machinery while playing this album.
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