Dali Muru & The Polyphonic Swarm (poet, filmmaker, vocalist Dalia Neis, producer Enir Da, & multi-instrumentalist Charles Lmx) fuse troubadour poetics, film soundtracks and primordial electronics. Guided by the spell of the spoken word, minimal percussive refrains, and oneiric textures, they channel cinematic images, enigmatic narratives, and spiritual frenzy. Their eponymous album was released on Stroom in 2022, followed by the audiobook âMurmur of the Bath Spiritsâ in April 2023.
You’ve mentioned that you formed the band in Berlin – can you talk about the genesis of Dali Muru & The Polyphonic Swarm?
Our starting point was Berlin, where I met Enir Da through a dear friend who ran a legendary, now defunct gay bar called Barbie Deinhoffâs. We sat together at the bar where I proceeded to unroll a long piece of loo paper which had a poem on it, I forget which poem it was, I think some kind of nursery rhyme I wrote about a place in South London where I once lived. Enir was keen for the poem to come to life through musical collaboration, so I agreed.
In a previous life, Enir and I formed a project called FITH, which developed from a duo set into a revolving door of artists, poets, and musicians based in Manchester and Berlin. It was raw and chaotic, and we began to experiment with this multidisciplinary approach to performance that seemed to flit in-between a literary event, church sermon, and expanded cinema intervention. It was quite theatrical, and it felt like we were part of a creepy carnival troop that emerged out of a fairground attraction ride. We have faithfully retained, and fine-tuned dimensions of this atmosphere into our new formation as Dali Muru.
Dali Muru arrived at a time of transition; we needed a new focus, so we stripped back and paired things down, to the core of things, back to myself and Enir Da — and from this transition, the mythos world we created on our first album came out effortlessly, with piercing, minimal clarity. The live sets settled into triad form, with myself, Enir, and his multi-instrumentalist brother Charles Lamouroux. This triad form feels like an eerie kind of kinship, a solid yet permeable unit.
Dalia, you are a writer, sound artist and also filmmaker. Many of the lyrics /vocals in your music are narrative, sometimes they remind me of Anne Clark and her work. Can you talk about how your writing influences Dali Muru?
The album emerged in parallel with the process of writing my book âThe Swarmâ. It was a very unexpected and organic process, where lyrics became passages in the book, and passages of the book became lyrics to songs, setting the narrative arc for the entire album. Sometimes lyrics arrived first, or sometimes just atmospheres, like scenes from a film, spurred the textures of the album.
Making an album is like writing a novel, or making a feature film; they all have this epic sensibility that appeals to us; an expansive ground from which to co-create and imagine parallel worlds into being. This is a foundation of our creative process ; our first album as FITH came out in parallel with âZephyrian Spools (an essay, a wind)â, a hybrid poetry book I wrote on the presence of wind in cinema, along-side related wind tales of an erotic, and visionary nature. âZephyrian Spoolsâ was conceived as a failed film script, so it made sense to spill into an album format as part of a continuous, multi-sensory, filmic journey. I think a lot of this process has come out of my previous life as an experimental filmmaker; I was never satisfied by the results of my films, always wanting something beyond the images on-screen, drawn more to the enigmatic potential of the off-screen space.
Which literary and cinematic influences do you have?
In our previous album, we were drawing from particular source material that emerged out of the Trans-Danubian-Carpathian axis: At the time, I was immersed in Sergei Parajanovâs âShadow of Forgotten Ancestorsâ (1964), a feature film set in the Carpathian Mountains of Ukraine that was banned by the Soviet authorities. We sampled tiny, almost imperceptible fragments of this film in our album. We were also mesmerised by this Hungarian animation âFehĂ©rlĂłfiaâ (1981) with an outer-edge, psychedelic soundtrack. I was also reading a lot of Clarice Lispector at the time, and books on vampires, and anarchist movements in the Carpathians, and the Pale of Settlement empire. All these sources somehow became distilled, and transmuted alchemically into the album, and live performance.
Your eponymous release from 2022 is a voyage through Central Europe and its topographies, baths, rivers. Can you talk about this album and why you chose this specific region per se?
A sense of place is central to our creative process. It sets the tone, and becomes a deep well of inspiration from which we draw overlooked stories and figures, imagined, and historical, into the mythos world of the project. My ancestors come from Transylvania, so part of the voyage of the book and album was around this road trip that I made to these parts in the summer of 2019. I also spent time in Budapest during an artist/teaching residency in 2020. Somehow all these elements came together, along with the films, the texts, and the dreams that I was having at the time. I became obsessed with bathing at this particular Ottoman thermal bath ( the now defunct KirĂĄly bath). I bathed there every day, overhearing the gossip of the elders, listening to phantom choirs resonating in the bath chamber. A magical ley-line emerged on my route to the bath, the tomb of the Sufi saint, GĂŒl Baba buried on Rosehill, Bambi Espresso Bar, this topography arrived through detours and unexpected discoveries.
You are based in different cities, and countries. How do you operate as a band in practice?
We have a long history of making music together, and so can adapt easily to different conditions. Living in different places brings perspective to what we do, and has that romantic long-distance energy, so that when we all come together, itâs for these intensive bursts, where we get to travel and perform, and it becomes part of the excitement in our collaboration. We have also learned to read each other very well, and are all quite sensitive to each other’s needs and special ways, both on, and off-stage. Charles, has become a core member of Dali Muru & The Polyphonic Swarm, and comes from an improvisation background, so he very easily jumps in to bring his touch and input. As there is room for improvisation in our music, we give time for ideas to evolve, and shape them to the point where they find a place in the story we want to tell through our performances.
Can you talk about your live shows? It seems live shows are an important part of your work – where you sort of emerge in and out of the audience, while the band is playing behind you.
Appearances and disappearances are central motifs to the stories we tell in the music, and feature in the texts and lyrics. Characters disappear unexpectedly; a pack of living and dead beings appear in the Ottoman baths in Budapest, then disappear into the Carpathian peaks. The performance in our live shows play around with this motif, and the stage (which expands to the whole venue, including the audience), becoming a liminal zone where I emerge and disappear, or where the character I become does what it needs to do.
The more practical reason behind this is that I normally begin off-stage, and behind the scenes so that I can get into the head-soul space of the performance; this is a very holy moment for the band, where I get to summon the beings and the support team to protect us, and help to maximise our performance so that it does what it needs to do, and provides the optimal service to the audience present. I feel like we are service providers, holding space for people to dream, and that is a very delicate and deep service that I donât take for granted. I usually do a meditation called âThe Athro Techniqueâ where I point my tongue up to my skull and set the intentions, connect as best as I can to the place we are in, and then come on accompanied by many invisible spirits on-stage! It feels important to create a sense of intimacy, a sense of the ancient past, and the potential for a wider, more expansive sense of the present moment, that is what we try to communicate in our music and live shows.
What are your upcoming projects / plans?
Some significant radio shows, a new album along the way. We hope to keep connecting to our audiences through live shows too. We recently released our first song in Ladino, a rendition of a medieval protest song called âUn Cavreticoâ (The Goat) – a fundraiser released on our label, Stroom. We also have our side projects that nourish us: The brothers (Enir Da and Charles Lamouroux) recently released their first LP called Temir Alcy on Stroom: they will be playing live in Ghent, LiĂšge, and Dijon, mid-November. I will broadcast my first ever guided meditation on Refuge Worldwide Radio on November 18th. I also have a new project with my partner Susannah Stark, a new EP of love songs (feat. Enir Da) which we release on Stroom on Valentines Day! All these projects seem to intertwine, and support us gently in these dark times. We hope they provide a service to others too.
Interview Lucia Udvardyova
Photo Laurent Orseau