Romina Daniele - Exploring the Avant-Garde with Vocal Cords | Romina Daniele Music Official Website

Diffrazioni Sonore The Reviews

Collected Reviews

LUCA RAPETTI (COLLETTIVO BLOGBUSTER)

MASSIMO SALARI (ROCK IMPRESSIONS)

ALESSANDRO NESPOLI (THEHOLYHOUR)

DONATO ZOPPO (MOVIMENTI PROG)

FRANCESCO OVARELLI (TERRITORIO MUSICALE)

RICCARDO MEROLLI (ROCKAMBULA)

ALBERTO CAROZZI (SANDS-ZINE)

BLOGBUSTER.IT

An introduction: the work by Romina Daniele can be placed in the avant-garde; and a prayer: listening keeping away every preconceived idea, any pre-established music rule, its common meanings, structures and constitutive elements. Now we're ready to listen to "Diffrazioni Sonore".

After some minutes of listening, it is evident a clear affinity with the Demetrio Stratos’s solo works: like the Area singer, Romina has based her work on the voice as well; the voice as instrument (every sound in the record comes from her vocal cords), potentially more versatile than the common use limits, voice as a language carrier (not necessarily intelligible) and voice like research: what we can reach with the voice?

The realization of this project, supported by a strong philosophy (which is the Manifesto of the work), is free from all the common processes as well: to record vocal improvisation during long sessions, developed in the shape of hypnotic mantras or complex vocalisms; to undo the reins to the gibberish, or to sounds difficult to understand that have been produced by the human voice (the control and the huge timbre variety of Romina’s voice let us understand the great work behind).

The next step, following the improvisation, is to re-take the control, the choices, the compositions process to create the tracks.

The method as the final result is fascinating.

Works like this obviously arise more questions than assertions: where is the line that separates the experimentation and the ultimate result? How such research about personal limits can be seen out from its natural hermetism?

Anyway, it must be said that Romina shows great courage proposing a work like this, probably more than that Stratos needed in the 70’s, when there was an audience very sensitive to the experimentation.

“Diffrazioni Sonore” goes beyond, thanks to its extreme visceral character. It proposes a new relation between music and text and represents a variety of feelings and moods: uneasiness, anguish, rage, neurosis, liberating insanity, carefreeness, lightness. Romina is able skinning the skin from the emotions until it comes to the bare flesh, destabilizing the listener who will be for sure enchanted, but undoubtedly marked by the experience.

Romina is young, her research can is just started and we absolutely expect very interesting things for the future…

(LUCA RAPETTI ALIAS SLOVO)

ROCK IMPRESSIONS

We use this occasion to remember (…but we have never forget) one of most important vocalist of all the times: Demetrio Stratos. It seems strange to start a review like this, but Romina is really dedicated to the vocal experimentation as Demetrio was.

(…) We, admirers of music, we often turn up our nose at certain kind of trial. Bad. It would need to approach the subject with the necessary cultural and mental qualifications: here there aren't tunes to croon, neither music to whistle (...) In Diffrazioni Sonore we listen 30 minutes of vocalises, which are improvised during a 3 hours studio session, but following 3 years of solitude, passion, silence (...) A sonorous experiment in which the voice continuously changes, exactly as a pinched and stretched spring does.

Nowadays, I didn’t expect that there would be artists willing to create… today everything is moved by the “god” money, and a product like this has nothing to do with that. This record did a strange effect to me, at the first listening I thought it was “anachronistic”, at the second one: “futurist”, then I’ve realized “Diffrazioni Sonore” is nothing else that Romina Daniele and herself. In her voice you will find new colours. You can enrich your palette, if you want. Generally, I suggest a preventive listen.

(MASSIMO SALARI)

THE HOLY HOUR

Does anyone knows where the voice was born? Where does it goes? What's its use and how does it works? Is it possible that this mean of communication, this natural musical instrument is paralyzed in a limited and wrong culture? In the West, this wall was pulled down by Demetrio Stratos, voice, not in a limited sense, of the band “Area”: he started with rock music and rhythm'n'blues, from a popular sound, to take his vocal research out of every limit of the musical experimentation; he implemented his technical work with scientific, psychoanalytic, ethnic and anthropological researches which enabled him to involve diplo-phonic and triplo-phonic techniques of mongolian and tibetan origin, which enabled him to work in a field of an avant-garde sound applied to the theatrical expression, as Antonin Artaud's work.

This wide, but not dispersive, preface, introduce us to the character of Romina Daniele who, worthy to be a Stratos pupil, has produced a work strictly rare and elaborate, not really mannered. Supported by a far-seeing musical qualification (classic guitar studies and jazz, blues and rock collaboration), Daniele has been awarded with the "Demetrio Stratos" International Award for the Musical Experimentations in 2005, proposing "Diffrazioni Sonore". Nothing else to say. A masterpiece.

(...) Who is greedy for Stratos opera and all its spheres will be naturally interested to the work of this great and mad experimenter; Romina Daniele in fact, she gives us the possibility to listen, by the female side, to all the changes coming from the different ways to use the voice-mean in the communicative interaction. The vocal experimentation by Romina, furthermore, makes a huge change compared to the Stratos work: the phonic form of this latter came from a different language, not a secondary aspect of his research.

(...) Romina gives "voice to the voce", this is her great contribution; she can let her body pass through the "tongue", like Demetrio said.

(...)The wonderful voice of Romina is to be felt, with the physical and theological values, leading the listener to exercise the hearing, to analyse the voice from its primeval aspect, to the discovery of a fascinating genetic/sensitive code.

(ALESSANDRO NESPOLI)

TERRITORIO MUSICALE

The work that Romina Daniele has carried on over these years should not been so easy.

The entire work is based on a research exasperated to the core, to be retaken in several and improvised sequences (...) The result, the first matter, is all here. The uneasiness, the happiness, the pleasure, the serenity are some of the emotions which Romina transmits to us through the most versatile and malleable instrument at everyone’s disposal: the voice.

(...) The voice supports the whole work, it's the only source for the composition. Almost unconsciously, Romina realizes a splendid work in the contemporaneous art ambit. The atmosphere is almost theatrical, crude and visceral, marked by the superb and agonizing Romina’s vocal ups and downs. The artist enchant us with this perfect sonorous puzzle. It’s useless at this point to divide the work into different tracks, it can be seen, in fact, as an entire big opera.

I think this is one of the most interesting work over these last years in Italy, and to not have it, it would be absolutely inexcusable.

(FRANCESCO OVARELLI)

PROG MOVEMENTS

Improvisation, cut, vocalism and diffractions

When Area and Demetrio Stratos are mentioned, the frequent question is: who has taken their legacy? Here she is, a great heiress not only for the vocalism but above all, for the deep exploration, spirit of the Stratos's research. Romina Daniele has been awarded with the "Demetrio Stratos international award for the musical experimentation" in 2005: her bold and avant-garde project "Diffrazioni sonore" gave her this great acknowledgement.

A work composed and produced entirely by Daniele, who is confirmed an ideal trait d'union between different artistic ways, from Donella Del Monaco to Diamanda Galas and Demetrio Stratos. The voice – in its all shapes, the overtones and the possible “transfiguration” – is the protagonist of the record, which can be seen as a pulsating and misleading “sonorous spot”, in particular during the episodes like "Altàmere" and "Di-sonore". The opera was born from improvisation ("unbridled", as the artist said), shaping form a “cut”, an operation almost cinematographic, distant from the new Albert Hera, closer to pop and world music solutions.

A cultured artist who deserves attention and support.

(DONATO ZOPPO, MOVIMENTI PROG)

ROCKAMBULA

"Diffrazioni Sonore" by Romina Daniele is something that with all my mental efforts I would never have expected: nothing partially attributable to a genre but an elegant and seductive vocal experimentation. An album that strongly honors the attributes of the gifted "Romina", sometimes courageous decisions rewarded by praiseworthy results. "The Opera" in question is difficult, the initial impact is not the most natural but the interest shortly stimulates a continuous listening which in the first minutes seemed unlikely.

I manage to listen to "Diffrazioni Sonore" in a strange condition, I feel very different moods until the total explosion of my brain. Perfect electronics mixed with a particular leaden voice, so my imagination goes through cold and snow paths. The continuous research and innovation are at the base of the perfect work by the Milanese by adoption "Romina Daniele", to find new ways when all seems already done is certainly talent. "Diffrazioni Sonore" deserves, without roundabout ways, sincere applauses.

(RICCARDO MEROLLI)

SANDS-ZINE

(...) If you look for something completely disconnected from scores written by others, then “Diffrazioni Sonore" by Romina Daniele could be the record for you. It’s too simple to recall Diamanda Galas and Demetrio Stratos (I wonder if also Daniele has a pinch of Greek blood too...), and a confirmation comes from the fact that she has been awarded with the "Demetrio Stratos International Award for musical experimentation" in 2005. But, listening deeply, a variety of other influences seem to come out, direct or indirect, which were more unpredictable (If I do not mistake, at a certain point, it seems to listen to a quote by Laurie Anderson).

The Daniele's working method consists into record totally free vocal improvisations - singing, reciting, screaming and vocalism in a broad sense - that are successively edited in complex set-compositions. It is a contemporary concept of the composition process, in which the writing is not on paper but on the take, or the hard-disk; it involves anyway an arrangement and adjustment work as classical technique of composition does.

(ALBERTO CAROZZI)