Скачать или смотреть Maddie Ashman - Seraphim (Official Visualiser)

Listen to ‘Seraphim’: https://maddieashman.ffm.to/seraphim

Seraphim started with a microtonal piano tuning, which I found very nostalgic, vulnerable and yearning, and a simple riff. Over two years I kept coming back to it bit by bit, adding vocal melodies, strings, synths. I wasn’t quite sure what it wanted to say until I showed it to my friend Jessa Brown (an incredible poet), who said it felt really haunting and made her think of a place called Cross Bones Graveyard. It’s a small patch of unconsecrated ground near the South Bank in London, where sex workers, paupers, and other marginalised or ‘outcast’ people were buried, from sometime in the late medieval period until its closure in the mid-19th century. At this time, the surrounding area of Southwark, while home to significant churches and religious houses, was also London’s red light district, ironically controlled by a powerful bishop. This uneasy relationship between the church and its control of women’s bodies threads through the area’s history - and it’s not impossible that some of those buried at Cross Bones may have previously been nuns, driven to sex work by poverty. Jessa thought perhaps the song could be a tribute to the voices of the dead and outcast who were buried there, and with that in mind she wrote some lyrics and I finished the song with them.

Cross Bones Graveyard is now a garden of remembrance and sanctuary. It feels important to recognise these hidden stories and histories, in a world where many women and perceived outsiders are still discriminated against and persecuted today.

Lyrics:
Ave
And saint (take me)
Ave
And Santa Maria

Saint Mary Overie (be here, be with)
Deliver and carry (hold tight, hold close)
Our river reverie (north south)
To know with (east west)
Certainty where we (hold us, down)
Closely will lie (lie down, lie down, lie down)
Each hand that touched me knew me not at all

Call us wild geese and we’ll fly away
Follow the river to find our grave
Are we most holy or just depraved
When people want us they find a way
We want to wander but seem to stay
Souls like our bodies will we be saved?

We survey
Here on the quay
Is ours now

All this
Left to us
Sirens

Ave
And saint (take me)
Mary
Ever overboard


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