Even though released in the summer, \u201cHiraeth\u201d feels like the perfect winter morning full-album listening – like the portuguese \u201csaudade\u201d, the welsh title conveys to the feeling of \u201clonging\u201d, \u201cyearning\u201d and \u201chomesickness\u201d – the world wanting to go home.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Birch and Nowacka\u2019s former collaboration happened in the Ephemeral Festival, an experimental music festival in Warsaw, Poland, and later in Krak\u00f3w, at the Unsound festival, in a performance that would make way to what would be their first album as a duo, \u201cLanguoria\u201d. But while \u201cLanguoria\u201d feels beyond space confinements, something that could be here and there at the same time, \u201cHiraeth\u201d happens in a place of belonging, a place that I long for and belong to.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
In a desire to flee from screens and modernity\u2019s demands, the two meet in Soko\u0142owsko, a southern polish village home to a sanatorium said to have been inspiration to The Magic Mountain<\/em> by Thomas Mann, and began weaving voices, zithers, guitars with birds, water and trees, recording directly from the fields on a Nagra Tape Machine. <\/p>\n\n\n\n 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. \u201cHiraeth\u201d is vulnerable yet extremely present and devoted.<\/p>\n\n\n\n We enter in a \u201cRabbit\u2019s Hole\u201d, 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 \u201cHeart of a Waterfall\u201d. A stillness in movement and natural change, slowly being with the surrounding spirits of the sun, the water, the ground.<\/p>\n\n\n\n In \u201cN\u00f8kken\u201d (Danish word for \u201ckey\u201d), 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\u2019s a full cycle from sunrise to sunset. \u201cCollecting eyes\u201d, 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 \u201cDepartura\u201d we\u2019re left with the distinguishable tone of electronics, tying all of the elements together and giving it a proper farewell.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Going out, breathing in – outdoors music making feels necessary and \u201cHiraeth\u201d 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Favourite track: N\u00f8kken<\/p>\n\n\n\n <\/p>\n\n\n\n