Even though released in the summer, “Hiraeth” feels like the perfect winter morning full-album listening – like the portuguese “saudade”, the welsh title conveys to the feeling of “longing”, “yearning” and “homesickness” – the world wanting to go home.
Birch and Nowacka’s former collaboration happened in the Ephemeral Festival, an experimental music festival in Warsaw, Poland, and later in Kraków, at the Unsound festival, in a performance that would make way to what would be their first album as a duo, “Languoria”. But while “Languoria” feels beyond space confinements, something that could be here and there at the same time, “Hiraeth” happens in a place of belonging, a place that I long for and belong to.
In a desire to flee from screens and modernity’s demands, the two meet in Sokołowsko, a southern polish village home to a sanatorium said to have been inspiration to The Magic Mountain by Thomas Mann, and began weaving voices, zithers, guitars with birds, water and trees, recording directly from the fields on a Nagra Tape Machine.
This is a space of kinship and communion beyond the realm of everyday concrete life – a sacred interconnectedness that perdures despite all distractions, a treasure out there, right here, not even hidden. “Hiraeth” is vulnerable yet extremely present and devoted.
We enter in a “Rabbit’s Hole”, inducing a travel into this othered dimension – the rewinded strings take us through into delicate plucked guitars and zithers. We could speak of imagined landscapes or a valley of dreams, but it feels rather like a return to a deeper reality, the “Heart of a Waterfall”. A stillness in movement and natural change, slowly being with the surrounding spirits of the sun, the water, the ground.
In “Nøkken” (Danish word for “key”), voices are breezes swirling with the light, ascending, descending, enchanting yet reassuring, like sirens of the valleys. This is a music that flows with an adoration of the simple things than carry profound meanings – sitting on a rock, gazing at the horizon, singing with a friend, listening to the wind – it’s a full cycle from sunrise to sunset. “Collecting eyes”, the longest track in the album, offers a meditative space with field-recordings and bell-like ethereal notes from a vibraphone, a hypnotic alternating pair of strings layered with chanting breaths. With “Departura” we’re left with the distinguishable tone of electronics, tying all of the elements together and giving it a proper farewell.
Going out, breathing in – outdoors music making feels necessary and “Hiraeth” is a vessel to this space between time, where one is indeed one with what surrounds and time becomes vibration and sound. Truly healing for the soul.
Favourite track: Nøkken
