Wykrot

People love to claim words don’t exist in other languages, but Wykrot, the title of this album, is surely a Polish example. Apparently it means the underside of the exposed roots of a fallen tree – also seen as a gate to the underworld. So, no surprise that the music of Daj Ognia (Give me Fire) is earthy, rootsy and dark. The five-piece band featuring traditional Polish singer Anna Sitko, draw on Polish and Scandinavian (mainly Swedish) sources and accompany themselves with scratchy bowed lyres, drums, percussion and, on several tracks, bagpipes. They favour the bold, ritualistic and trance-like in their music. ‘Kir’ (Burial Gown) seems to tie together wedding and funeral traditions; ‘Trupietany’ (Corpses) is inspired by a dance-of-death painting in Krakow, the band’s home city, in which a ring of nine women of different social classes each dances with a skeleton, showing that no one escapes death.