Aisthànomai: Romina Daniele's Award-Winning Album with Powerful Vocals and Composing Abilities

Aisthànomai The Reviews

Translation from Italian Press

DIONISIO CAPUANO

(BLOW UP magazine)

MASSIMO MARCHINI

(Rockerilla)

ALESSIO ARENA(DREXKODE.NET)

DELIO SALOTTOLO (LABAUT)

ALESSANDRO MICHELUCCI (CORSICA MAGAZINE)

MASSIMO SALARI (ROCK IMPRESSIONS)

ROBERTO FILIPPOZZI (DARKROOM. MAGAZINE)

SIMONE BROGLIA

(MESCALINA)

TONY ARAMINI

(RITUAL-MAGAZINE)

BLOW UP MAGAZINE 119, APRIL 2008.

Romina Daniele has been awarded with the Demetrio Stratos International Award and in her new album we can notice not only a great vocal ability - power and versatility – but a great talent interpreting the sense of music and composing abilities as well. You can listen/read ‘Aisthànomai’ like a theoretical work, an organized anthology and a poetical-musical form.

First, it is necessary to read the booklet texts where the aesthetics topics are discussed. "‘Voice-Matter-Nature. ‘Electronics-Suond-Technique. Language-Text-Concept’. These are the territories in which Aisthànomai takes shape… and where my cognitive non-condition law is placed as an expressive aim freely pursued."

In a second point of view, the work offers a charming performance/interpretation.

The transfiguration of the song form through the organic changing of the voice (Materia), vocals-electronics assimilation (Echo, Vero Remake II), the dramatic experimentation on the text-vocals (Dix ans, vingt ans), sound poetry (Vero Remake I) and the total theatre-song (Poesis I). The work has different influences:

Galàs, La Barbara, Meredith Monk, Stratos, the experimental Julie Tippett.

Finally, almost in despite of her theoretic will (which can hamper the total fruition),

‘Aisthànomai’ is mainly a sensory experience (if not sensual) with the vibrating woman body, into urgency (impact) of the reunification. "I do not enjoy all the happiness, remember, it is divided in two parts, and both include emptiness’, it seems Emily Dickinson. But it is necessary to get into the voice labyrinth. [Dionisio Capuano]

ROCKERILLA 334, JUNE 2008.

I have spent an entire afternoon listening to this beautiful and brave album.

Romina is a young singer who spends her life studying the voice.

A devotion which led her win the Demetrio Stratos award.

"The Voice Is The Original Instrument", this was the title of a work by Joan La Barbara, ‘At the beginning it was the Word’, said someone before.

About aesthetic research texts (Aisthànomai is a Greek word which means to perceive, to realize).

The voice and the sound are so pure and so well performed that literally take the breath away. As if the plastic of the voice would be shaped here in a new aesthetics. Sometimes her research could be similar to the one done by Diamanda Galas some years ago - especially at the beginning of the album - but her semantic and musical approach is personal and sometimes heartbreaking too. Voice and electronics trying to define a meaning for this particular aesthetic and etymological project which draws equations between sensation, perception, art and representation of pain.

An experience which Romina is sharing with the listener evoking dark landscapes and some atmospheres similar to Bataille regarding the same expanded concepts.

A unique voice in the Italian musical scene. [Massimo Marchini]

DREXKODE.NET.

Let’s start from the end, imagine you are on a sea cliff… you can slip or try to fly, charmed by sirens’ call…but the mental magnet is roaming.

The complexity of the work of Romina Daniele is based on her fine vocal research, a way of using the voice as an instrument, like Diamanda Galas, but here there is more. A peculiar combination of different disciplines including theatre, philosophy, aesthetics and electronics used as a movie soundtrack. Aisthànomai - the Greek term that means ‘to perceive, to understand’ – with its essay and its multifaceted directions, it can be seen as a real opera of avant-garde theatre. Romina Daniele put herself in front of the audience stimulating it and producing a thrilling and a charming sound with vocals creating dark/shining atmospheres throwing the listener in a "lyrics-voice-music" spiral that oblige us to confront with ourselves.

‘Retro’ and ‘Post’ are two mannequins which have been taken and beaten, but it would be misleading doing too much personal descriptions, what is clear is that when the match ends, we find ourselves disoriented.

The vocal control is technically remarkable for what concern the vocal timbres and the expressive act that we can imagine just by the sounds.

Versatile tracks like ‘Sguardo (take2)’ seems like the Oz witch or ‘Poesis I’ recalls Badalamenti of David Lynch soundtracks. Then musical atmosphere like G.P'Orridge, but also a dark/ambient that goes into an unclear essence which can be seen by eyes not yet ready to light, sometimes similar to ‘Teatro Satanico’, from Italy too. Her unique and mutating voice creates endless moods. Aisthànomai is a great opera of direction, life and drama, asking the audience to take up the challenge and stay until the end. Whispers and screams. [Alessio Arena]

LABAUT, MARZO 2008.

Some (impossible) notes on

“Aisthànomai, the tragedy of Consciousness” (Romina Daniele’s latest album) [by Delio Salottolo]

Obviously (at this moment) I don’t want to understand music or to better said: obviously I’m not interested in this moment in seeking theoretical-technical explanations or advancing phonological (or phono(il)logical?) hypotheses. What sense would there be in grasping the ungraspable (now) when you listen?

The elusive annoying and dark sonority that resides in the total absence of referents, that stands out on an all-inclusive pitch-black background and that sinks into the exasperation of an infinitesimal calculation of portions of chaos thrown (without shame) towards the listener, between screeches (not of hell, absent question!) and baritone depths that do not make you sink but drag you into a horizontal invagination on the back of being-nothing, and then again the words that do not say and the voice that is not a shouting of words, but together voices and words are not at first meaning but (imp)pure signifiers, obsessive search for the modality of the One through the explosion of the voice that, having lost all rationality, wanders reflecting in fragments of (in)belonging.

Beyond the One (as sense, belonging, voice, word and sensation) and the Manifold (of senses excluding themselves, of the (non)belongings, of the (un)responsible sounds, of the (non)meaning, of the emotional cords skinned from the sounds), but we do not have to care about this: we have to face the real danger.

These are (only) the first reflections during the first listening (serious and direct testimony of (semi)automatic writing and of productive unconsciouses guided by sounds). May writing-prison leave us free at least in appropriate moments.

More lucidly, now.

So, why make music like this? Or, perhaps, the reference would be: why listen to music like this?

Let's try to rationalize and violate (even if as little as possible) this project: here is the zero degree of experimentation, that is, experimentation that experiments on itself and not on a substrate to (e)xperiment, it is music out of time but that does not belong to any a-temporal aura, it is the theater of the voice that recites its (im)possible vocal exasperation, it is a superhuman vision, it is immediately intuition of non-existent spaces; the voice is used as an instrument without purposes whose delirium risks making the most beautiful days explode into nightmares or making even the slightest hasty screech of our (lack of) soul exhilarating; it is not simply music, it is a test or a challenge thrown to the listener whose stake is the temporary annihilation of every normal constitution of the self.

It is trans-individual music-experience, it is pure function, it is the real destruction of the possibility of every universalizing individualism. It is a simple network of interconnections and so:

“Voice-matter-nature. Electronics-sound-technique. Language-text-concept. Here are the three territories where Aisthànomai (a term emblematic of perception and knowledge) unfolds and is realized and on which and in which my law of cognitive non-conditioning is placed and situated: as an expressive goal deliberately pursued.” (from the booklet)

In summa. Why miss this hallucinatory portion of chaos?

[Footnote in the original text]. Romina Daniele is a Neapolitan product, developed until the age of reason in these lands. Then Milan. She is the winner of the Demetrio Stratos International Prize for vocal research and musical experimentation in 2005 and a dear friend. The tragedy of consciousness is hers and ours. Or the absence of both.

[Description contained on the front of the Magazine] "Labaut is a self-produced magazine active in the Neapolitan area since September 2004. The term Labaut is an acronym for Laboratorio Autonomo di Letteratura [Independent Literature Laboratory]. A laboratory that it continues to experiment and research on language in its experiences in prose and verse; research that does not like to dwell on definitive canons but continues to incessantly rethink and reformulate itself. Autonomous in that it is not tied to funding from any institution (university, municipality, associations), but self-produced and distributed free of charge. It is believed, in fact, that culture should be, like primary goods, accessible to all beyond the mere economic market. Labaut's activity is an intense and continuous laboratory that embraces, beyond the paper configuration, parallel artistic experiences: short films, readings, music."

ROCK IMPRESSIONS

With the previous record, “Diffrazioni Sonore”, we met a one-of-a-kind artist, Romina Daniele. She is a voice experimenter and an active lover of art in general, including painting and photography. The work of “creation” that we were able to appreciate in “Diffrazioni Sonore” was purely vocal, without any addition of instruments. Courageous and enterprising, with a truly high artistic dose, we find the same today in the more appetizing “Aisthànomai”.

“To knowledge”, this is the meaning of this Greek word, the artist takes possession of the knowledge of art and transmits it to us, with her 17 pieces, and her vocation that refers to philosophical science applied to art. She transmits us the sensations she feels, in the lyrics often of poetic nature, about the drama of consciousness and what happens to man.

This time it is not just mere vocalism, but we can listen electronics on which the singer express herself completely, her voice going beyond, above its structural logics which we have always been used to in our music listening. Intensity, weirdness and theatrical atmospheres together in a reticular way. As the artist says: ‘Aisthànomai involves sound diffractions and introduces text diffractions (whereas the text commonly intended is the symbol of the omniscience I want to unhinge) and digital diffractions….”. For what it concerns the text, there are quotes from Barthes and the analysis of the awareness, knowing one’s own self and the world around us. Once again I find myself speaking, althoug briefly, of a person who lives art at 360°, without limits and with all of herself.

These artists are not common, they live in the underground of Progressive (if we really want to find a location for them….) and they believe blindly in art, the pure and uncontaminated one and they breathe it.

Obviously they won't sell records in industrial quantities, however they are worthy of note and deserve respect, because art needs to "progress", it needs research, it needs to explode in all its magniloquence. Romina Daniele shines with her own light, she is confusing, but if you listen to her without mental barriers, then you can appreciate her in all her dazzling beauty. With "Aisthànomai" you will discover new psychic places, but be careful, this journey is recommended only to the most curious and open-minded of you, to the others I underline the fact that here there are no guitar licks or anything else that represents Rock. Where does she want to go? [Massimo Salari].

CORSICA MAGAZINE. OCTOBER 2008.

The first instrument was the voice. Then the others came: from percussion to guitar, from wind instruments to keyboards. As a result, the voice has taken on a secondary role, and in some cases has even been set aside.

However, there has been no shortage of artists who have explored the possibilities of the voice to restore its role as an original instrument.

Just think of Joan La Barbara, who in 1976 recorded an LP entitled Voice is the Original Instrument (Wizard Records), or to Cathy Berberian, to Diamanda Galas, to Meredith Monk. All women: it may be a coincidence, but the most recent proposal in this field also comes from a woman. We are talking about Romina Daniele (www.rominadaniele.com), a young singer born in Naples in 1980 and living in Milan. The Neapolitan artist (no relation to Pino Daniele) represents one of the most interesting and autonomous innovations on the Italian musical panorama. The fact that she uses her voice as an instrument projects her into a territory that few have wanted to explore.

Some might be tempted to compare it to Alan Sorrenti, who in the early Seventies tried to work on the voice with interesting results. But it would be a mistake: Romina Daniele moves in a different territory from that of the Anglo-Neapolitan singer-songwriter, who, despite using the voice as an instrument, remained substantially linked to the logic of the song.

Romina Daniele's experience recalls that of Demetrio Stratos, a brilliant singer of Greek origin who lived a long and fruitful artistic season in Italy, starting from rock and moving on to more radical experimentation.

It is therefore no coincidence that the Neapolitan artist won the the Demetrio Stratos Prize, established to remember the great Hellenic artist.

Shortly afterwards Aisthànomai (2008) was released, it stimulated considerable attention from the specialized press. Already two years earlier, with Diffrazioni sonore (2005), the. musician had laid the first brick of his sonic and conceptual edifice. Aisthanomai continues that path by clarifying its contents and objectives. It is not just a record, but a complex work in which sound, theory and poetry happily intertwine, giving life to a coherent and complete result. The extreme particularity of the vocal approach is accompanied by long texts: vocal research is combined with poetic research.

The album does not fall "into the false waters of non-conformism", as stated in the CD booklet. Romina Daniele refuses to be classified as an avant-garde artist, because this word seems empty and overused to her. Her research is directed at the origins of sound, not towards a hypothetical future. In the small volume included with the album, a long text stands out where Romina has collected numerous philosophical and musical considerations. Generally, when we find ourselves in front of a notable new artist, we say that "a star is born". But the Aischânomai singer is light years away from commercial logic. In her case we must say that "a voice is born". [Alessandro Michelucci]

DARKROOM MAGAZINE.

Romina Daniele is not so much known yet, but she is representing one of the best new artist of the Italian avant-garde musical scene. In 2005 she has been awarded with the Demetrio Stratos International Award for musical experimentation thanks to her first record. This award has been given to Meredith Monk too and it is dedicated to the memory of Demetrio Stratos which has given a great contribution to the musical experimentation with his band Area and the solo career - thanks to her debut album "Diffrazioni Sonore".. But it is with this second long-distance work that Romina achieves a surprising maturity, which allows her to implement a concept, "Il Dramma Della Coscienza", the combined title with the very meaning of the Greek term "Aisthànomai" (i.e. to perceive, to understand), and underlines how within the work coexist a strong exploration and an in-depth research that do not stop at the purely technical side, but that decisively support an accurate interior analysis by the Neapolitan artist. An electronic blanket so light that it often appears impalpable, yet so effective in supporting the moods of the lyrics in an often leaden and lightless context, is the backdrop to the real key instrument, that is, Romina's voice itself, the true protagonist in the 17 tracks that make up the album (including a surprising cover of Miles Davis, "Nuit Sur Les Champs-Élysées") in what is undoubtedly also an exploration of vocal potential in an avant-garde/dark context. Dark, yes, because that's how this second work (very well produced at all levels) by Daniele sounds, a long introspective journey in search of answers that perhaps lie in the folds of perception, or that perhaps are destined to change always and in any case, whose revelation seems the only way to give peace to a deeply restless conscience. Although many vocal solutions and even some instrumental textures may in fact recall certain works by the Greek/American Diva, we are also certain of the fact that the artist from Campania is in possession, in addition to qualities enormously superior to the average, of her own personality that emerges clearly both from the structures of the compositions and - in particular - from certain wonderfully explained intuitions, which reveal to us a versatility capable of both terrifying and enchanting.

Also worth mentioning is the rich booklet, nothing short of excellent and complete with all the necessary information (notes and texts in Italian included) to better understand the extent of our artist's research. A work of enormous internal and external honesty that is absolutely not to be missed by fans of quality dark avant-gardism, to be discovered, understood and elaborated as one should with Art that really has something important to express, while waiting for further and deserved recognition to which Romina's indisputable talent is destined.[Full review (Italian) by Roberto Alessandro Filippozzi]

MESCALINA.IT

“Aisthanomai”, the second album by the vocalist Romina Daniele, comes out two years after the Stratos Award, received as young artist.

It is certainly not an easy and agile listening album, on the contrary, it is one of those albums we are less and less used to, and put us in front of a complete experimental project. It is precisely this structural rather than conceptual aspect that strikes the listener in the first place.

The substantial booklet with the detailed exposition, on an aesthetic-theoretical level, of the work and the artistic choices denotes a preparation made of study that undoubtedly becomes one of the most characterizing traits of Romina Daniele's work.

The previous album “Diffrazioni Sonore”, a fairly clear exposition of one of the major characteristics of the sound wave, was concentrated on vocal experimentation, taking away space on the one hand from the possibility of a musical project and on the other from the possibility of verbal expression.

In this “Aisthanomai”, released three years after “Diffrazioni Sonore, we can see the deepening of a studio work developed in different artistic fields ranging from theater, of which Daniele adopts a recitative approach, to aesthetics, of which she examines a Deleuzian vision of art, up to poetry.

In addition to these aspects, which are certainly an important contribution to the structure of the album, the musical and vocal components remain fundamental.

The first is based on electronics: concentrating on the sound, it is a work about frequencies, often about very low frequency sound waves, which play an important role at a perceptive level.

The main theme, however, is the voice, the cornerstone of the entire album: not an instrument, not a means to create synonyms, the voice is the very presence of the artist (as the author underlines).

If the voice is the physical presence, then the album presents a split, divided and recomposed consciousness, separated by frequencies, capable of expanding, stretching, smoothing and sharpening in a very small space. A consciousness/voice that breaks and, through digital processing, is taken up and united with non-vocal sound parts.

Romina Daniele presents us with a research work that at the end of listening leaves us satisfied as the possibility of having a record with an experimental project behind it is more and more rare nowadays: a research on sound, on dynamics, on vocal timbre, on theatre, on poetic text, on aesthetics, on the body. [Review (originally in Italian) by Simone Broglia]

RITUAL MAGAZINE, N. 35, JULY/AUGUST 2008.

Romina Daniele's work fits the furrow of extreme vocal experimentation, so it is impossible not to mention two essential references such as Demetrio Stratos and Diamanda Galàs. The voice as an instrument, therefore: dozens of vocal tracks constructed and edited to create a dark collage with unusual harmonic features. The choice to interpret two excerpts from the soundtrack of "Ascenseur pour l'échafaud" in this light is brave, and like a good part of the album, it is a sign of versatility and good mastery of the means, considering also the young age. Accompanied by an elaborate concept that is far too pretentious for the lay listener, "Aisthànomai" has all what it takes to fascinate that fringe of the public that loves peculiar work or those with unsetting atmospheres. [Tony Aramini]