Seven Swords by Shari DeLorian

Realia is pleased to announce the release of “Seven Swords” (Realia005), the latest work from Milan-based artist and performer Shari DeLorian. With its gritty materiality, intimate atmospheres and liberating digressions––at times dreamy, often bloody, Seven Swords revolves around the impossibility of seeing yourself for whom you really are. It’s a concept album about self-knowledge and the sorrows deriving from the long harsh road to it. Admittedly, the record’s title pays homage to the well-known religious icon “Our Lady of Sorrows”, named also “Seven Swords Mary”. Depicted with seven swords piercing her heart or radiating around her, in popular culture “Seven Swords Mary” is the name by which the Virgin Mary is referred to in relation to sorrows in her life. Reflecting the artist’s peculiar interest in cultic––mostly Orthodox––imagery, in the context of the album the suffering Virgin becomes a universal metaphor for the violent traumas that constitute the self.

The main idea behind the record came to Shari DeLorian in July 2017 during an artist residency hosted within an abandoned factory in Jura, Switzerland. There, the original plan of conducting a site-specific experimental work was soon discarded in favour of elaborating a more visceral and direct expressive language. Specifically, this was pursued by reintroducing the artist’s own voice into his practice and grammar some fifteen years after earlier formative experiences as a singer in punk rock bands. Overall, the production of the album has spanned a period of two years. Yet, most of it has been recorded in a mountain lodge in the heart of the Swiss Alps during two subsequent artist residencies.

In the attempt to transport the listener into the same places where the music was composed, all tracks, and especially the two interludes and the title track, incorporate background noises found therein. Stylistically, this is in intentional contrast with the overtly artificious, hyper-digital tropes dominant amid contemporary electronic music. Clearly committed to an experimental electronic sound, the album is nonetheless pervaded by feelings of loss and nostalgia evoked by the prospect of a possibly imminent return, or rather exile, to urban life. To capture the place-specific, sensorial experiences (the fabrics, smells, sounds, views etc.) inspiring the making of the record and yet susceptible to oblivion after the artist’s departure, in this work prominence is accorded to instruments capable of reviving that subjective mental territory––namely, analog synthesisers alongside acoustic instruments such as the harmonium and cello.

Released in digital format, Seven Swords is complemented with a printed publication of the same title.

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