The Voice of (one's*) Conscience

JUNE 2008

DarkRoom Magazine:

New Interview

"The avant-garde as such does not indicate a sector or a genre, it is by definition an a-sector, it indicates precisely a movement (cultural, human, artistic action) which "programmatically" aims at the research and experimentation of new expressive forms, in controversy with the traditional ones (such as the categorization itself and the conception of human thought by sectors): the program consists in not having a program, assimilable to known codes and techniques, or in an indifferentiation of programs and codes, in a cultural reticularity from which the absolutely new emerges. In this regard, I assert: «My "I in research" moves from the questioning of every certainty within the methods and techniques, within the approaches (... ) If we are involved in experimentation, it goes without saying that we have just a purely didactic interest in categories, indices, names and definitions. Some time ago we brought about a halt, an inhibitory action, recognizing them as mechanisms - usual - of the cultural status quo. Let's talk about the methods originally proposed to us. Methods and techniques known and already given that we refused to practice, because of imitation and false perception.» [R. Daniel, IV. The self in research (vocality) in: Voce Sola (collection of short essays on vocal speech), currently online on my website.] As for judgements, they don't interest me."

OPEN THE DOOR TO THE WORLD OF DARK SOUNDS... Issue 19 — June/July 2008 Interview by: Roberto Alessandro Filippozzi (Photos by Matteo Nieddu)

ROMINA DANIELE — Gothic / Italian Panorama

The approach to the artistic work of a figure like Romina Daniele, by necessity, cannot be the one that is usually often utilized when relating to much of the contemporary music that reaches us as new, which is frequently fit to withstand a single season or little more. For those of us who follow everything that constitutes "dark music," we like to think we are above the average buyer of Madonna's latest "gem"—the one who, to be clear, purchased such a record because they were subjugated by the repeated radio broadcasts of objectively horrible singles, or because "Madonna is a myth, even the TV says so!" And if this largely corresponds to the truth (because in this scene there are tons of cultured insights for reflection, rather than "4 minutes"...), it is likewise true that our context is not exempt from "analyses" so superficial as to drive certain people to think that the pinnacle of dark/gothic music is the catchy tunes of BlutEngel or Marilyn Manson...

And so we immediately understand how a work like that of the Neapolitan singer, while remaining open to the appreciation of various different fractions of listeners, will arouse interest first and foremost in the "niches"—that is, in those who choose to analyze what they purchase, and do not buy a record merely to be able to listen ad nauseam to those two short singles "endured" on the radio. Daniele’s work is one that places its foundations on research, and therefore evades the concept of simple entertainment that belongs to that throwaway art so in vogue in our times.

Romina’s work, so far composed of two albums, stands out in the panorama of self-productions (a deliberate choice, as we will see further on) and of Italian music in general precisely for its will and capacity for research—values that are certainly not so common in the country of Max Pezzali and Vasco, but are nevertheless present on multiple occasions in the history of our nation through the work of never-forgotten artists, starting with that Demetrio Stratos to whom Daniele is deeply bound.

In an attempt to better understand the objectives of a path as ambitious as it is absolutely interesting, we set off on the trail of an artist who weighs every single word with enormous attention, for the purpose of making the message arrive in its most appropriate form: here is what the eloquent and kind Romina told us during this long and pleasant conversation...

Darkroom Magazine: You were born in Naples in 1980, and you grew up there until 2005, presumably moving within that span of time your first steps in the world of music: how did your work as an artist begin and how did you discover your vocal potential?

Romina Daniele: "Over the course of time, along a branched path, I have gradually deepened the 'voice-body', 'the body that gives itself voice', and the 'voice-action', in order to be and to say that I am. From the age of 7 to 14, I studied classical dance and classical guitar. After a few years, with a diploma in solfeggio and music theory, I left guitar studies for those on the voice. I began my university period and some important reflections.

My relationship with music is very poetic, and lyric, in the etymological sense: when I begin to vocalize, the idea that moves me is expression—the putting into form of my writings and my poems. After some collaborative experiences, I matured a poetics of vocal knowledge that in its course shifted from the interpretation of my texts—poems to whose writing I have dedicated myself since around age 15—to the voice in itself, which I elevate to a total metaphor of being there (dell'esserci) and of 'saying': knowing how to say, being capable of saying, having the strength to express oneself vocally, and by paradox even without the communicative tool par excellence: the word. The works of Demetrio Stratos are the absolute highest with which I confront myself along my path. A door opens for me, beyond which I see an immense space, a symbol of my experience to come."

Darkroom Magazine: In 2005, an undoubtedly important turning point occurred for you: you moved to Milan to live there. Is there any exquisitely artistic motivation behind your relocation?

Romina Daniele: "The artistic motivation is the Stratos Prize, and the fact that it was established in Milan, the city where Stratos himself lived. I moved to Milan, and my work Diffrazioni Sonore, sent to the Prize Jury, preceded me. I had to do with local bands (mainly in proposing blues repertoires), then I remained in vivid anticipation of the outcome of the Prize, in which I trusted for a form of fulfillment of my 'difuoristi' musical goals (meaning, not accessible to casual consumption)."

Darkroom Magazine: 2005 was undoubtedly the year of the breakthrough for you: not only did you release your first work Diffrazioni Sonore, but you even won the famous Demetrio Stratos Prize. Would you like to tell us how you lived this special year on a human and artistic level?

Romina Daniele: "The CD Diffrazioni Sonore was produced by me in view of the Stratos Prize. It represents my work sent to the jury, and the one for which I was awarded. For this reason, I then decided to distribute it. The Stratos Prize itself represents the first degree of 'gaining awareness' regarding the possibilities and developments of my work. It represents this recognition: that of 'being in research'.

«Research in its modal meaning—a 'doing' that is a 'making arise'. Doing an action: acting, in the sense of 'bringing into being', operating: being and creating, being in research. (...) Vocal research does not have a popularizing character and is for the purpose of bringing—objectively following observation and confirmation by others, and subjectively in reference to the author who operates—original contributions to the progress of vocal knowledge, or rather to proceed in the production of vocal phenomena within the external (empirical of vocalizing) and internal (of consciousness) experience of those who operate and enjoy it, with specific and identifiable characteristics.» [R. Daniele, I. Della voce per dire and IV. L'Io nella ricerca (la vocalità), in: Voce Sola (collection of short essays on vocal discourse), currently online at www.rominadaniele.com/pagine/testi.htm]"

Darkroom Magazine: Let's return for a moment to Diffrazioni Sonore: what did this first step into the record market represent for you and how satisfied are you with it?

Romina Daniele: "Diffrazioni Sonore is currently distributed as a complimentary gift; it does not technically represent the first step in the market, but the first form that my work 'in research' has assumed, insofar as it is destined for the consumption of others. My work back then was constituted by about three years of vocalizations. Diffrazioni Sonore is instead a 34-minute record; therefore, the most important thing in this orbit of discourse is the transition from the work itself to its representation.

«In the beginning, I could not have imagined the tracklist, the titles, the duration of the tracks, or their 'structure'; however, I had two outlines, the thought-concept of 'diffraction' and a certainty: in the studio, I would vocalize as I was accustomed to doing every day for a few years: the recording would represent first and foremost an essay of all the vocalizing of the years 2002–2005, of the work of gaining awareness, and of the way in which this work, in terms of pure vocalism, took place.» [R. Daniele, II. L'Io nella ricerca (la progettualità), in: Voce Sola].

The record also represents an essay regarding the methodology of composition: «Montage is the composition itself of the tracks, not simple final editing, equalization, and mixing—strictly technical work by a sound engineer: rather, I use these tools within a multimedia, digital compositional conception. 'Composition' is therefore to be understood in its etymological sense.»"

Darkroom Magazine: In the period that elapsed between your first work and Aisthanomai, how did your approach to artistic creation change and why?

Romina Daniele: "Diffrazioni Sonore, as I was telling you, is not just a recording session, but an essay «of my work of creation and processing (post-production), of the way I work, and of the meanings that theory and practice assume for me on concepts such as 'system', 'structure', 'composition', and 'art'. It is clear that assumptions so pregnant with meaning are not valid for a single project, a single recording session, a single digital processing session, or a week of sessions. Rather, these are postulates that place themselves at the foundation of a life and a work, in relation to which those of many illustrious men in history stand as contributions, and for whose deepening ten lives would not be enough in this world.» In this sense, in Diffrazioni Sonore there is only the voice and the montage: no music, no words, but a vivid interest in the phenomena of perception. In Aisthanomai, Il Dramma Della Coscienza, «the things that stand out to the ear, to sensitivity, and to perception as a whole, are two: electronics and text. 'Other' elements» that I used as tools of creation and means, and which in this sense I related to pure vocalizing (vocalizing through sounds, without words), interested in the relations themselves and the 'interstices' that different levels (electronic sounds, emblematic poetic texts, pure vocalizing) would generate on a perceptive level."

Darkroom Magazine: Let's come now precisely to Aisthanomai, an album for solo voice and electronics: how was your desire born to express yourself in solitary in this particular form?

Romina Daniele: "The term 'electronics', in the orbit of my doing, is an expression to be understood in its purest sense: of (sound) 'produced electronically'. I am interested in multimedia, as the simultaneous utilization of multiple means, tools, and languages: different levels, indeed. Inside the sounds there are then still levels, represented by the variations that exist under every acoustic aspect: pitch, dynamics, rhythm, intensity, and movement. Technically, digital montage is the key to this type of creation, and here resides my multimedia, digital compositional conception. 'Voice and electronics', therefore, is not a chosen form, but my primary interest within the methodology of creation and composition. As for 'solitary', I say that isolating the deep self, the self that creates, is an indispensable condition of research."

Darkroom Magazine: Your vision of electronics appears impalpable and leaden (plumbea): was this actually the type of scenario you wished to paint with the machines employed?

Romina Daniele: "My vision of electronics is, as I said, a compositional conception—an articulation of the sound space. The movement and activity of every single sound has an importance of its own: in terms of dynamics, frequency, and musicality; and another that derives from the relationship with the other sounds. Every sound is created electronically, meaning that at the very moment I create it with the aforementioned characteristics, it is ready to constitute a building block of composition, a relationship. This is not possible if you record a traditional instrument. This is precisely electronics.

I am interested in the modes of production of meaning, in the processes of creation, in the relationships between sounds, and in the relations that these establish (as components of languages) with the other levels/languages (texts and musicality, the latter to be understood as the 'tension of sounds towards music as commonly understood'). In my initial intentions, there is no painting of a scenario, but the interaction between languages: all those I make use of, from poetry to the stage performance itself. Therefore, electronics assumes its meaning within the work. The possible definitions of the final result, at the level of pure musicality, are many; they depend on the taste of the listener. This is the case with your reading and the use of the adjectives 'impalpable' and 'leaden'. If you ask me what I am looking for, though, I don't speak of adjectives, but of methodology, montage, and creative processes in action."

Darkroom Magazine: Do you find it correct to place your work in a sector with indefinite boundaries like avant-gardism? Do you judge what you do in an artistic sense to be avant-garde?

Romina Daniele: "The avant-garde as such does not indicate a sector or a genre; it is by definition an a-sector. It precisely indicates a movement (a cultural, human, artistic action) that aims 'programmatically' at the research and experimentation of new expressive forms, in polemic with traditional ones (such as categorization itself and the conception of human thought by sectors): the program consists in having no program assimilable to known codes and techniques, or rather in an undifferentiation of programs and codes, in a cultural reticularity from which the absolutely new emerges.

In this regard, I assert: «My 'self in research' moves starting from questioning every certainty within methods and techniques, within approaches (...) If we are involved in experimentation, it goes without saying that we have a purely didactic, completely accessory interest in categories, indexes, names, and definitions. Some time ago, we called a halt, an inhibitory action, recognizing them as habitual mechanisms of the cultural status quo. We are talking about the methods originally foisted upon us. Known and already given methods and techniques that we refused to learn, because they belong to imitation and false perception.» [R. Daniele, IV. L'io nella ricerca (la vocalità) in: Voce Sola]. As for judgments, they do not interest me."

Darkroom Magazine: Music and lyrics, except obviously for the Miles Davis cover, are exclusively your work: did you deliberately maintain full control over your art, preferring to make use of other personnel only as far as the purely technical aspect of production is concerned? Do you ever think of involving other artists in future works, or will you maintain this setup?

Romina Daniele: "Two recording engineers, two translators, and a photographer constitute the other personnel. I am very attached to the production aspects: in particular, the work of the audio engineers strictly concerned the tracking phase, the recording. Editing and mastering are instead important phases of creation, because we are talking about electronics; these are things that directly concern me and my work: the sound space, the sounds, and the relationships between sounds, in electronics, are the composition itself, what I call montage. As I told you, montage is the composition itself of the tracks, and the multimedia conception is the key to my research in a compositional sense. The relationship with other artists, on the other hand, I foresee for future live performances."

Darkroom Magazine: The first thing that emerges from your new songs is the strong personality that characterizes you in your daring beyond the boundaries of pre-established genres, and personally I believe that this is the extra weapon at your disposal in a panorama attentive almost exclusively to squeezing the trend of the moment like a lemon: how much has it cost you, in terms of work and dedication, to reach this result, and what importance does it have for you to have achieved this milestone?

Romina Daniele: "My research is purely philosophical: art is its expression. This thought is at the basis of my action, of the forms it assumes, which are therefore observable. In 'terms of work and dedication', research coincides with my needs: I study the voice to be aware of the psychophysical phenomena that concern me, insofar as they are specific to the human condition. I believe that without questioning and research, existing is superfluous."

Darkroom Magazine: What other groups and/or artists have actually been important for your growth as an artist?

Romina Daniele: "Janis Joplin and Miles Davis, Fyodor Dostoevsky and Marcel Proust, Friedrich Nietzsche and Gilles Deleuze, Jusepe de Ribera and Francis Bacon, David Lynch and Michelangelo Antonioni."

Darkroom Magazine: In your new work, you included a cover of Miles Davis: why him specifically, and why this piece? I am also curious to understand how this cover fits into the rest of the work, since its choice was surely not accidental...

Romina Daniele: "My studies in art history and criticism at university culminated, in recent years, in multimedia and cinema from a theoretical, aesthetic, and linguistic point of view. At the root of this orientation is the idea of multimedia as the crowning achievement of all arts. Cinematic montage, and therefore cinema itself, comprises: all artistic languages in relation to technology and furthermore direct reality; the relations between languages, hence the technical order beyond the aesthetic; the relations of these languages with reality, so the reflections of the humanities disciplines converge in cinema; reality as presentation and reproduction; cognitive research. My graduation thesis is titled: 'Ascenseur pour l'échafaud, il luogo della musica nell'audiovisione' (The Place of Music in Audio-vision). The first relationship of interest to me in multimedia is that between music and image.

Ascenseur pour l'échafaud is the first film by Louis Malle, a French filmmaker among the promoters of a revolution in cinema called the Nouvelle Vague, and because of which cinema is called modern. The soundtrack is by Miles Davis. I saw in this relationship a fundamental cross-section about which I have written a lot, and of which I report the concluding passage, which also fully explains why I paid tribute to some fragments of this soundtrack:

«Louis Malle’s operation therefore takes place on at least two levels. On one hand, the 'lost or impeded' movement indicates the 'loss of consciousness' that is proper to the individual in modern society, and upon which the author bases his poetics (the 'worldliness' corresponding to the meta-film object of the 'film he would have liked to shoot' [P. P. Pasolini, 'The Cinema of Poetry', in Empirismo eretico, Milano, Garzanti, 1972, p. 187.]); on the other hand, the montage sveles [unveils] the mechanism of the fiction that presides over the narrative, and over the same audiovisual network, in the combination of elements (sound and visual) in themselves disparate, yet 'not opposed, on the contrary reconcilable and harmonizable' [cf. G. Deleuze, Différence et répétition, Paris, Presses Universitaires de France, 1968 [it. trans. Differenza e ripetizione, Milano, Raffaello Cortina, 1997]. (...) The 'optical and sound' status that stages 'time in becoming', 'sculpting time' [M. Chion, L'audiovisione, suono e immagine nel cinema, cit., p. 22], corresponds in fact to a level of spectatorial perception based on the contrast between elements of a different nature acting simultaneously, each with its own identity, on its own side, 'different but not opposed'.

This state of perception is the foundation of the reticular and non-hierarchical or sectorial conception of knowledge so professed by Deleuze's philosophy, as represented by authors who turned categories' codes and styles upside down, making the work coincide with research on the medium and on the conditions of knowledge. We conclude therefore with a current reflection on the problem of relations between sound and visual, with Chion’s words. It goes to place itself 'at the level of mentality. Taking the reflection on sound and its application, both technical and scientific, out of the naturalistic groove' [Ibid., Verso un cinema sensoriale. 4.1. Una crisi?, pp. 129-132], means making a form of research and concern emerge that is more incisive than the simple 'exploitation' of multitrack sound in the contemporary world; and utilizing technology as sensory and material apprehension, and the necessity for technical research.»

Darkroom Magazine: Delving into the contents of the record, we would like to start with the title chosen for it, “Aisthanomai, Il Dramma Della Coscienza”, where the word 'Aisthanomai' stands for understanding, perceiving: what concept of synthesis best summarizes the meaning to be attributed to this title?

Romina Daniele: "The word 'Aisthanomai' stands for understanding, perceiving. The 'Drama of Consciousness' derives from the conception held today, even at the level of the human sciences, of the phenomena of perception and understanding. This conception is fallacious—hence the drama (of Consciousness, which reveals itself to be: absence of Consciousness). The phenomena of perception and understanding are not to be traced back to psychology but to philosophy, not to rational thinking but to intuition. The word 'Aisthanomai' is also the etymology of philosophical aesthetics.

«Philosophical aesthetics or art criticism is the science that deals with writing about art and on art. The modes of this writing indicate to the highest degree human consciousness regarding its own processes of creation and enunciation (artistic), and—considering the current state of culture and its 'specific disciplines', both artistic and scientific, its direct impacts on the individual and their human consciousness—the denoted condition has the attributes of a 'drama', with the social implications that the term entails.» [R. Daniele, II. L'Io nella ricerca (la progettualità), in: Voce Sola]."

Darkroom Magazine: How much is personal, or of inner analysis, in this 'drama of consciousness' and what does the textual research of your new work aim at?

Romina Daniele: "In relation to what has just been said, and as I have written elsewhere, the 'drama of Consciousness is the theatre of human events', it derives from the absence of Consciousness. «Consciousness: from the Latin, 'to be aware', in the sense of awareness of oneself and the external world, insofar as it is a psychic function in which every cognitive experience of the subject is summarized. Therefore: to be aware, namely acting and knowing towards oneself and the world.» [R. Daniele, Il dramma della Coscienza, essay, booklet of the CD 'Aisthanomai, Il Dramma Della Coscienza' (Milano, Romina Daniele, 2007)].

What is personal in this, or of inner analysis? In response, I transcribe for you the text of 'Vero (remake) I', track 16 of the record:

«What has nature amputated from the musical exorcism? / And who from all the symbolisms of evocation and outflow? / Stripped of any cultural dignity, / of any perceptible efficacy. / What reduces man to single morbid episodes? / Over which the historian of religions and the psychiatrist are called to judge, who? (...) / Unconditional. My thought having broken free / Outside of my body.. / It is the absence in all its extravagance. / I see nothing but Absence. / – Is there nothing out here that is more beautiful to see? / – Is there nothing that is more beautiful to see and to admire? / There is nothing else but Absence: key to my pain: / I do nothing else but tear myself from / my heart I do nothing else / but tear myself from my heart, / I do nothing else.» The absence is obviously the absence of Consciousness. For me, 'textual research' is not, however, merely the text in itself—a composition in words like the one above. The 'expository synthesis of a thought' can occur through different languages; the relationship (interaction and co-extension) between these gives rise to textuality: the level of discourse, the discourse in its unfolding. The articulation of the work, the mode or modes by which I made it arise. The modes, like the languages, are diverse: those of music, poetry, and writing, within a context (an a-context) of 'undifferentiation'. All of them are tools of my thought. Even the essay, the writing, is for me a tool—a tool of my 'doing' and of my 'saying'."

Darkroom Magazine: In the very rich booklet, both the lyrics and your analysis of the work are reported in both Italian and English, a sign of how important it is for you that the listener can understand the album as well as possible: what do you actually feel the need to communicate to those who listen to you, and why did you choose music specifically to express such deep and elaborate concepts in a period when people seem to no longer know how to either search or listen?

Romina Daniele: "The choice is innate, and is traced back to the path by which I arrived from dance to poetry and to music, or rather to the voice, as an emblem of being there (dell'esserci) and acting. As I tried to explain recently: «The 'voice' equals 'being/creating'; I say: the voice equals the relationship between being and creating. Relationship: comparison, result of division, excesses of meaning and gaps between connotations and aspects of 'being' and 'creating'. As such, I say, it presides over every processing and different types of project planning.» [R. Daniele, I. Della voce per dire in: Voce Sola]."

Darkroom Magazine: Have you ever taken into consideration the idea of composing a soundtrack, or of associating your music with images that could be a worthy complement to sounds and voice?

Romina Daniele: "It’s an idea that I like. I would never speak of a complement, however, in relation to 'sound/image'. I wrote my graduation thesis strongly asserting the idea of a dialectical and coextensive relationship between music and image starting from the difference between the two languages.

«Like a contract, the audiovisual dialectic does not involve a total fusion, but presupposes the disparity of its terms, which exist 'separately at the same time, each on its own side' [M. Chion, L'audio-vision. Son et image au cinéma, Paris, Editions Nathan, 1990 [it. trans. L'audiovisione, suono e immagine nel cinema, Torino, Lindau, 2001, p. 159.].»I would therefore work within a «'double flow', a visual flow of projected images and a sonic flow of music that unfolds, setting 'in motion a permanent second degree' [C. Metz, L'énonciation impersonnelle, ou le site du film, Paris, Méridiens Klincksieck, 1991 [it. trans. L'enunciazione impersonale, o il luogo del film (edited by A. Sainati), Napoli, Edizioni scientifiche, 1995, p. 171.] » [The passages are taken from my thesis: "Ascenseur pour l'échafaud, il luogo della musica nell'audiovisione", pp. 160-161]."

Darkroom Magazine: There seems to be interest from insiders across various sectors here in Italy towards your artistic project, to the point that detractors are nowhere to be seen, while excellent reviews are not lacking: how is the general feedback and your mood about it, and which sector of music has so far been most receptive to your proposal?

Romina Daniele: "I wouldn't speak of sectors being more or less receptive, but I would say that the fields interested are diverse to the extent that they find themselves in agreement in recognizing the 'stylistic openness' of my work, and this means that everyone can highlight from the record what is closest to them. Starting from this datum, the feedbacks properly so-called are still ongoing, but we have certainly noted, as you also say, a generally positive wave."

Darkroom Magazine: Do you think that a proposal like yours, given the choice to predominantly use the Italian language, can also make inroads abroad? Are there responses from other countries to date?

Romina Daniele: "At the basis of the choice of language, as a linguistic code, lies this matter of fact: where used, the language adds itself to pure vocalizing — that is, it adds to the 'meaning' of the sound a 'second' or 'double' meaning, another discursive and signifying level. Therefore, I would not use it if I did not attribute to it such a raison d'être: it is fundamental then that the word, wherever present, is perceived with clarity, so that the user/recipient can 'interact' with this level of the text (and by 'text' I mean the composition in the relationship of all its levels: poetic, musical, etc.). Even for shows in Italy, it is a recent thought of mine, to be implemented soon, to project the various texts that I use.

Therefore, when I am abroad, I perform poems and textual improvisations in English; however, this is not a dry translation, but another type of performative experience within the orbit of the undifferentiation of styles, techniques, and languages. The recent experience in Slovakia testifies to this effect. On the other hand, it is certainly true that, in the case of compositions (not live improvisations, but live executions of parts of the record), 'versions' other than Italian are unthinkable because they would assume, contrary to my initial intention, another meaning with respect to the compositions themselves. It is then indubitable that Italy is not accustomed to a certain type of experience; my work, by its very nature, has an extended destination. The feedback on the record is still ongoing to this day, and we will officialize later on in relation to the most significant responses regarding future official foreign initiatives."

Darkroom Magazine: What, instead, is your relationship with the purely 'dark' Italian scene, the one that feeds on the so-called 'dark music' of which your record can fully be considered a part?

Romina Daniele: "I have relationships with all scenes or with none. My 'darkness' is not properly the adherence to a movement: the 'dark scene'. This definition refers to a moment in music with precise reference to the identification of a certain cultural current, a certain ferment, a certain ardor, which had a very precise direction. From my point of view, all artistic manifestations of man (every creation of his, in truth) cannot be observed outside the context of social and historical belonging. For me, the 'dark scene' is the historical one (Cure, Joy Division, Bauhaus, Sisters of Mercy, and early Nick Cave): we are at the turn of the Seventies and Eighties.

This music represents the human being confronting the void, by now entirely obvious, that consumer civilization has built. Not having experienced the era firsthand, the aspect that really brings me closer to these experiences concerns darkness as a human dimension of which I feel conscious, in the sense that the problem of being is the very shadow of man. And it is for this reason that I assert: the problem of being is a problem of consciousness."

Darkroom Magazine: Up to this point, your records have been produced and realized by you yourself firsthand: does this depend on the disinterest of record labels that are only attentive to money, or is it a precise choice of yours?

Romina Daniele: "The publication offers for the record that is today Aisthànomai, Il Dramma Della Coscienzacontained, each in its own measure, conditions regarding production that would have modified the general framework of the work in one or more phases of its realization. In my order of ideas and in my thought, however, production is not a secondary matter, but the technical and aesthetic process that constitutes the work, and of direct interest to me. The meaning of the work arises precisely from the modalities of creation, from the progress of the phases curated by me in fact firsthand: from the recording to the final montage, to the composition of the 'finished' product with texts and notes on the texts. From this perspective, my work, and its meaning, subsist because they are in the absence of mediators.

Even the most interested publishers, today, attribute to themselves this function — that of mediating: technically proper to publishers, but which becomes improper when it includes a moral attitude — which derives entirely from a culture in which art and music are consumer products, or at the very most, prostituted. If I make art, and the result is the records you know, I do it because I live in another type of dimension of thought, where the one who creates does so with tools (painting, music, poetry, etc.) which vehicle a meaning: this meaning is the work, not an accessory to be forged. A passage then comes to my mind, which expresses exactly what I mean. I was reading it from the introduction to the text L'ovvio e l'ottuso (The Obvious and the Obtuse), a collection of critical essays by Roland Barthes, signed by the French publisher (Du Seuil) after the author's death: «Barthes himself, attentive to the slightest detail concerning his activity as a writer, always drafted the essential part of the accompanying blurb of his books (...) consequently the publisher feels his intervention here as an inevitable constraint.» What was felt there as a constraint is, instead, a frequent practice in current domestic publications, especially musical ones, where the publisher feels it as a 'right-duty' to intervene to 'present' the product in a 'certain way'. And it is exactly this that I forcefully refuse."

Darkroom Magazine: What can you tell us regarding your future activities, both in the studio and live?

Romina Daniele: "I am in an operational phase. For me, recording means the 'putting on record' of the voice, insofar as it is an object of study. With a certain frequency, therefore, I am in the studio; at a certain point, I will draw conclusions from the work, and then it will be time for a record. As for my performances, at the moment, they fall entirely within the scope of the event, both from a poetic and practical point of view."

«My 'darkness' is not properly the adherence to a movement such as the 'dark scene'. From my point of view, all artistic manifestations of man cannot be observed outside the context of social and historical belonging. For me, the 'dark scene' is the historical one: Cure, Joy Division, Bauhaus, Sisters Of Mercy, and early Nick Cave...» — Romina Daniele

Darkroom Magazine: We are closing: we leave you space for a message that can help readers to understand and appreciate your work more, hoping that your answer will arouse the curiosity of those who have not yet listened to your records.

Romina Daniele: "My experience, understood as the birth-giving of the philosophical condition of interrogation, to which common sense is not accustomed, can arouse the ferment of perceptual states beyond automatic considerations (unconscious and mechanical systemizations), the fruit of habitual perception, of the intellect. In this exaltation, then, resides the sense of theatricality and processuality, of the «very knowledge of meaning» or rather "re-presented" as action «through the very excess of its versions: expression» [R. Barthes, Diderot, Brecht, Ejzenštejn, 1973, in "Revue d'esthétique" [it. trans. L'ovvio e l'ottuso. Saggi Critici III, cit., pp. 94-95]. My italics]. And «meaning is the expressed»: «one will not ask, therefore, what is the meaning of an event: the event is the meaning itself.» [G. Deleuze, Logique du sens, Paris, Les Éditions de Minuit, 1969 [it. trans. Logica del senso, Milan, Feltrinelli, 2006, p. 27. My italics.] [R. Daniele, II. L'Io nella ricerca (la progettualità), in: Voce Sola (collection of short essays on vocal discourse)]."

Original print source: Darkroom Magazine, Issue No. 19, June/July 2008. Text by Roberto Alessandro Filippozzi. Italian archival clipping available online at DarkRoom Magazine. English translation officially authorized for the Romina Daniele Archive.

*Post Scriptum: Voce Sola actually began in 2008, as an "online periodical publication), i.e. the work of defining notes and fragments written in prose on vocal speech, the subject of research for the last years". And so we read on this site in the Texts section, when some fragments of essays were published in 2008. These were then removed in 2009, when we began to plan these writings for a book and broader analysis, and so the work on the encyclopedic book Voce Sola has been announced since 2009.

We welcomed with enormous positivity the title that Filippozzi gave to the interview reported here, in the knowledge that we have at heart of the adjective word "own": not as something merely subjective and not shareable, but rather as something that is proper, that is, typical, adjuvant, of the pure faculty of knowing, tending to: give rise to a more proper and more our understanding of a completely human property, proper and ours (...) proper apprehension as much as we breathe, such as to be authentically understood in us more originally as already ours and proper, and not already as a reflection as it is possessed by a socio-utilitarian system such as the current one. [Romina Daniele, Essay on Vocal Speech 2009-2024]

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