Romina Daniele – The Art of the Voice

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Romina Daniele – The Art of the Voice

Non solo Progrock [Not only Prog Rock] has had the opportunity over the years to review ROMINA DANIELE’s music, Neapolitan singer and a broad spectrum artist. She studied the guitar, poetry, painting, the history and methodology of art, photography, and theories / history of cinema. In 2005 she received the International Prize "Demetrio Stratos for Musical Experimentation". Her voice could very well be included in the context of "Teatro Della Voce" [Theater of the Voice], where the vocal cords are fully involved in many shapes, as a unique and personal instrument. Theatricality, intensity, bizarreness and courage explode in her music, intersecting in a "reticular" way.

In this interview we focus on her personality, upcoming projects and ... Much more! Enjoy the reading.

Where is Romina Daniele going today, what matters most considering your history and your production?

Thank you for your interest in my work and perspective once again I have some good news to make known today. But for folks who might have missed your earlier articles on my records, I will introduce my story and the way I do music and art.

What matters most for me is the between working with music, thought and technology, multimedia and philosophy. I do music with vocals and electronics, I write and research and work with visuals as well. This work is most concerned of researching the meaning of the human being, and less concerned of producing records with the times of the industry. I am an independent artist from my head down to my shoes. For the last years I have been working on my epistemological essay Voce Sola, Saggio intorno al discorso vocale [Solo Voice, Essay on the vocal discourse], which is very much related with its pillar concepts to my last record Spannung (triple cd, 3 hours, released in 2016). From German, it means tension, and it refers to the tension of the research itself to the original authenticity of the human being.

As brain is still unknown in the field of medical, the sound is still unknown in that of physical. And brain and sound are deeply involved in composing as in singing. And as I remarked with the same passion of my research, “tension to the essentiality of every single thing is urgent and necessary. Voice is what was there at the origin, a question of body and thought, the focus and the cornerstone, and there is no other places or sounds like that at all. Then music is an essential act concerning the apprehension for man and his work as well.

This is an original, urgent and closer responsibility, as own as the breath is, which reveals itself in front of the missing.

Man and his work, language, history, philosophy and art, science, nature, miss the authentic and own-most sense of themselves; because if it was not so, if they did exist in the structure and not in the missing, society would not be as utilitarian as opportunistic, we would benefit from it at all, we would not have disasters and wars instead of dignity of man, and we would be already on our way to the sense of what we originally and authentically are, which indeed is missing, and we have been searching for.”

When I produce a record, that is like a thesis at the end of an important step of a life research. Even though if I base them on improvisation, which is a pure act of openness on the way through the origin, recordings are done to be the essential part of an accurate compositional act. As I was stating, producing my very first record, Diffrazioni Sonore [Sound Diffractions], I have always been interested in the "entre-deux-coup-de-dés" (as Deleuze called it): the in-between of composition, working between the terms of the construction-sensation relationship, and on their co-extension.

I research while recording and composing, in the same way I research as I write. However, when I write a book, what I said about producing records happens even more: although I released 3 records with my name and 3 collaborations - and each one is fully conceptual and represents a world of its own -, I never considered them definitive and conclusive. They always have an open finale, as we still need to go through further and further steps of our research. Each records, like each book (I published two essays and a collection of poems), is a thesis at the end of an important step of a life research, with an open finale.

While I was writing my book on the voice, I found my self involved deeper and deeper in a dense tissue of connections and ramifications I could not avoid to face. The essay become epistemological and I am treating every argument very carefully.

When I came to Miami some years ago, I though I could use a relaxing place to keep writing while taking care of my newborn. Then I worked at Jadys Daniele’s for many concerts and the management itself.

What is Jadys Daniele’s specifically?

Jadys Daniele’s is a live music project that I started and founded in Miami in 2019, together with Lorenzo Marranini, co-founder of RDM Records, co-author and creator of the album Absence (2016) and father of my daughter, who has the name of Romina Jadys Daniele. So we decided to use our daughter’s name for this further and important project, which had an operational headquarters for the entire year 2019 in South Beach. We created an intense series of concerts and collaborated with many local artists. We intend to continue with this project later. For anyone interested, in the meantime at the website Jadysdanieles.com you can find many details and its history.

You talked about books, can you describe the contents and how they connect with music?

While I was working on the very final review of this book of mine, I had the chance to present some of its arguments while being interviewed a couple of times on some American magazines last year, even if I did not mention it specifically. I want to enucleate and put together those specific passages now, so my readers can imagine from this perspective, how many relations and references the analysis called to be investigated - although I decided to use for these passages, designated to our interviews, a fluid language with simple words and no quotations.

What we ourselves are and therefore what we are seeking, awareness and consciousness, knowledge about life and death, the divine: all these are synonymous, in the light of our research that we consider the research:

(…) Multimedia and philosophy are one thing, with everything in between and

around. The first aim you need to have to make true art is willing to work on the connections, between techniques and materials, levels of perceptions and the human being and the universe.

You will learn the skills and abilities you’ll need being connected to the vocation of doing art.

There will be no schemes or rules others made for you, you may need some just in case mainly working in the land of creation where the real and unique goal is to catch knowledge and to spread it for the good of yourself and the entire human being race.

You know you are a main energy in action using the techniques and the technologies to create and understand, so to share and spread. The action of working and create is everything you are in (the way you do) and no subject can move you from the path (the things you can do).

There will be no final purpose other than the main one, the unique and most important, the one which remains — as a conscious and thinking being open to the connection with the purest and original sense of existence.

I believe human being is on earth with the purpose of creating, which is the same thing of thinking, where thinking is creating thoughts and consciousness, not a mechanical brain operation. It is being in the opening tending towards the original meaning itself.

This is all about to being open to understand a little more of the original meaning of what we really are. And to share is for your own good and that of the human being race.

(…)There will be no final purpose other than the main one, the unique and most important, the one which remains — as a conscious and thinking being open to the connection with the purest and original sense of existence.

What we ourselves are and therefore what we are seeking, awareness and consciousness, knowledge about life and death, the divine, the research, the most original sense: we must never forget that the most proper meaning of what we ourselves really are is already within us, beyond our understanding, to whose openness we tend with the research itself.

Moving in a sound context like yours, it is not easy to get noticed by the general public; what are the biggest obstacles you have encountered, considering the type of work you dedicate yourself to?

As the most proper is something we can tend to, revealing itself in front of the missing, the resonance of the most proper thought presents itself before us as a pre-existing certainty, something we are 100% sure which is in us as present and sure the heart or another organ is in our body. You cannot doubt a certainty like that. It is already there, even before our (logical) understanding. And in a pre-existing condition to the ordinary is the essential, to the false is the true, to the ephemeral is the lasting. This means that a poet is then thrown into the world with the knowledge of the difference. Between the ordinary and the essential, between the true and the false and between the ephemeral and the lasting.

All the obstacles and the challenges I found along my path were situations in which somebody or something has tried to put me away from my own intuitive knowledge, to mislead the true meaning of what creating and doing art is in my experience. Those situations have naturally been challenging obstacles. In front of them I lost some concert or publication opportunities, probably some steps of the so called career. They had tried to put me in some categories, they have tried to sell my art. But there is nothing more rewarding of the feeling and certainty of doing good, along a research path to be naturally kept as most as pure we can.

What can we expect at this point in your musical production?

My first work and cd, Diffrazioni Sonore [Sound Diffractions], will soon have a second edition, with some extra tracks taken at that time and kept unedited so far. We are still deciding on the format, it could be a vinyl as well.

Diffrazioni Sonore was originally recorded and finalized in 2005 and it is largely considered an avant-garde record in which extended techniques and free vocal improvisations meet a concrete concept of composition with technology means. I keep considering it opera - in Italian this word also refers to the whole work and production by a writer or artist -, at the point that I recently wrote: “For the truth, Diffrazioni already existed before the Stratos Prize, along that unique path that lies directly ahead of us and is found, it seems, with difficulty only because it is so close. Diffrazioni, although dealing with concrete music, extended vocal techniques and improvisation, electronic composition of music, and, and, and… concerns me so directly that it touches my essence and makes it clear to me that all possible considerations and ramifications, when they intertwine, are themselves the direction, therefore vast, extensive, indeterminate, and made of different points of view. Not that my other productions are any less important, however, with my next album I will try to surpass Diffrazioni, because with the next two I had not set myself the goal and clearly did not succeed.”

This is from November 2021, when Vero from Diffrazioni has been published inn the compilation record Approdi III (The avant-garde in Naples), produced by Konsequenz and Girolamo De Simone in Naples, Italy.

Although with that work I won in Italy the International Stratos Award for musical experimentation, I published it only in 2010 with a very limited set of copies and with the label RDM Records, after my actual second work, Aisthànomai, already came out with a larger production in 2008. Then, you know, we got Spannung published in the 2016.

During my years at Conservatorio di Milano, in the 2010 as well, I recorded the sound for the film La chute de la Maison Usher (Jean Epstein, France, 1928) with the Riccardo Sinigaglia electroacoustic ensemble. It has been screened with live improvisations by the ensemble, and I realized an editing with the recorded music which deserves to be published. As we decided with the Maestro Sinigaglia, we’ll coordinate soon to release this amazing work of art.

And so my precious supporters can count on the fact I never stopped producing music for the literary path, and I started working on a new record which will be published with my name. Some moments of this new production have been pictured and the pictures are attached here today.

These three productions will have different release dates and they will be announced.

As you read reviews or articles about your music over the years, how have critics approached your style? What would you have liked to read and, if so, what would you like to clarify more deeply about your work?

I would like to take the opportunity to make a note. I noticed sometimes some feedback - and I thank you so much the critics - reading my work as going through the inside, like caring about the one, instead of the outside and caring about the others. Although I am sure what I said with this page today already clarify that my research is meant to be shared, making the sharing itself the precious goal of the research, I would like to highlight the meaning close to my heart of the word "own”, which often I recall as own-most or more proper. It is not something merely subjective and not shareable, but rather it is proper, typical, adjuvant, of the pure faculty of knowing, tending to: give rise to a more proper and more our (own-most) understanding of a completely human property, proper and ours. It is a proper apprehension as proper our breathe is, a part of our body, our brain, such as to be authentically understood in us more originally as already ours and proper. When I say “we” I do not mean us different from you, but I mean humanity, and what is most proper to humanity is what we care about, what is most authentic and that therefore we are looking for. What is most authentic about humanity is necessarily still to be discovered, researched, investigated, in an ordinary society and socio-utilitarian system, made up of material interests, disasters and wars, and hidden powerful people who work every day to pollute souls.

That’s why I say: in front of all this, creating sense is a necessity and a responsibility in the love of the human beings. That’s why I say: human being is on earth to create — as a conscious and thinking being open to the connection with the purest and original sense of existence.

If Romina Daniele were a single color, what would it be?

It may seem paradoxical, but if I were a single color, this color would be white, being the result of a combination of additive colors. According to the additive color theory model, light and electromagnetic radiation create additive color, and the combination of all colors generates the perception of white. Containing all colors, and imagining myself with white, I would say that each listener will be free to perceive me with the color or combination of colors that most absorbs them in listening.

Perhaps this is the reason why when working with additive color, red, green and blue are used as primary colors, which are also the colors I love.

So why, together with red and teal blue, do I continue to use black in my productions and not white?

Well, color is an expression of light. When almost all the light is reflected, we see the color white. Otherwise, in the absence of reflected light, we see the color black. On the other hand, any authentic researches can only exist in the form of tension towards the essential origin or in its own missing, such in the social structure and utilitarian mindset. And so, as in a pre-existing condition to the ordinary is the essential, to the false is the true, to the ephemeral is the lasting

as in a pre-existing condition to the absence (of the perception) of light — black — is the expression of light — white —. In the absence of the authentic and most proper meaning of everything, and that therefor we have been looking for, the urgency of a research operating in the openness, and made of tension towards the origin, can only be represented with the essential primary colors of the light, that thus manifests itself.