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Rumpus Book ClubSWINGING MODERN SOUNDS #23: The Tragedy of Consciousness
Daniele: The use of language, too, is included in the idea of “opera” as described earlier, in a stratification of different levels: Voice-matter-nature. Electronics-sound-technique. Language-text-concept.
The original purpose of my work is not being identified as an “extended vocal” technique, although I like the expression. I am against definitions, even for known techniques, because they are barriers that do not help one develop one’s individual creative energy and one’s thought and personal technique.
Each technique must be used within the limits of one’s expressive needs, to create a piece; but no technique determines my work. In other words, I come first, with my thought and creative energy; then come the techniques (those I have learned and a few I have invented), which I use as a means. My energy flows through the techniques and uses them, not the other way around. This topic is also discussed in the essay I mentioned earlier, which I invite you to read. So, “extended vocality” is a technique which I deploy naturally, according to my expressive needs; the same happens with my use of language. Each sector in the cultural system tends to prevail by establishing its own independence and difference from other sectors. Writing, for example, is only true writing if it remains on a printed page; its value changes or decreases if it is made into a screenplay. Music is true if it is recorded or played at a concert; its value changes or decreases if it is used as a movie or installation soundtrack. Similarly, voice as an instrument defines itself as independent from music and language, by becoming “extended vocality.” What I’m most interested in, though, is interconnections. I consider culture a network and identify categorization as the black hole in the development of human mind.
Italian is the language I use most often since it is my mother tongue, and it cannot be replaced by any other language. However, I also use passages in English and French. Sometimes I even write in English, as in “Fallacità, Take II,” a couple of unpublished pieces and some things I am currently working on. I also provide an English translation of all my lyrics. Aisthànomai comes with a 36-page booklet, as the poetry and texts used are an important element of my work. Many of my texts are poetical as well as musical, and they may be performed live in a different language (for instance, “Poesis I and II”). I have played in English abroad, so that I could get my message across to more people. This, however, is impossible for the songs whose text is originally in Italian (such as “Echo” or “Fallacità”). Occasionally I have improvised English versions of some of my pieces. “Matter,” a particularly felicitous English version of “Materia,” was included in a video shot in Slovakia. I will soon record that version to include it on my new release.
Moody: I was interested to read that a lot of this work is improvised. Do you improvise in the recording studio? Or do you work out a rough outline, maybe in performance, and then come into the studio with some idea of the shape of a given piece? Or do you really just make each piece up as you go along? And in the case of multi-track recordings, do you go back and layer over an improvisation, or is it all done in the moment with a looping program or device?
Daniele: Diffrazioni Sonore originated from the recording of a three-hour studio improvised session. I worked on it and reached the final version of the record. The recording is a result of the study of voice I did years ago. I looked into the “liberation/discovery” of voice beyond limits/techniques: it was an extremely intimate experience and I recommend it to anyone who wants to become aware of their being through the vibration of vocal chords (connected to the laryngeal muscles), in a unique and undefinable union between body and spirit. At the same time, each track with superimposed voices is the result of intense computer-assisted composition work (processing, modeling, etc.). In the inside cover text, I explicitly mention the “mixing, which I consider work,” in the concrete sense of the word.
In Aisthànomai, the spoken parts and the vocalised verses are always improvised in studio, because improvisation is all about instinct and expressiveness, both of which are absolutely needed in my poetical compositions in music. The superimposed voices, in this case, were recorded after the main voice; there were several recording sessions over the course of two years. A number of compositions or pieces formed during their very performance; others were created on the basis of an ongoing organization.
Moody: How much performing are you doing regularly in Europe? And can we expect to hear you play in New York City ever? And what are you working on now? Do you have other projects you are working on besides music?
Daniele: As I have said, I performed twelve times in three years, then paused for a year. On 20th March I was in Milan to present part of the new album I’m working on. I’ve had no offers from the States yet. We haven’t looked for opportunities there either, but we soon will. America is the place where we sell the most.
I am currently working on the project Spannung. Quoting from the official presentation, this is the term Heidegger uses to indicate the opening, the sense of space, the tension (and torment) of being in a dimension of authentic existence. This dimension has never been adequately discussed and requires intimate and new forms each time, far from the clichés of intellect and composition rules. In the concrete and time-bound human condition, a struggling being is itself strength: “tension of strength itself (Derrida).” This is true at each level of my work as work of art: at a concept and thought level and at an artistic, literary and poetical, musical, compositional, vocal, aesthetic level: it’s not about an accomplishment, but an opening, not a system or its negation, which is system itself, but a tension, which is always action, operating force.
I am also working on a collection of essays, as I said before, which will include my thoughts on “vocal discourse,” and a thorough discussion of my production method.
Both works will be published by RDM Records Edizioni discografiche e letterarie, which I founded earlier this year with Lorenzo Marranini, a fellow musician; his first record is in preparation, and I will be collaborating on a few pieces.
Aside from publishing our own work, we declare our support to: every movement and activity aimed at researching and experimenting new forms of expression; products of thought and action as such, whose creation establishes itself as a reality, energy in the form of being; human production in general, as we believe that there are few real creators today, and few real publishers as well – what few publishers there are, are more or less interested in the profit of their company and support talentless skill, brainless packaging, the poor taste of people lacking specific interests.
***
[1] Program notes by Berio for Visage, published on www.temporeale.it, the website of the center founded by Luciano Berio in 1987.
[2] “Here ‘synthesis’ does not mean a binding and linking together of representation, a manipulation of psychical occurrences where the ‘problem’ arises of how these bindings, as something inside, agree with something physical outside. [...] has a purely apophantical signification and means letting something be seen in its togetherness with something – letting it be seen as something.” M. Heidegger, Seit und Zeit, Tübingen, Max Niemeyer, 1928 [English translation Being and Time, Malden, MA, Blackwell, 1962, p. 56]
[3] But amazement, if it is an end in itself, coincides with the “realization” of the “boundary” (form of definition, misleading judgment).
[4] S. M. Eisenstein, Izbrannye proizvedenija v šesti tomach, (vol. II), Moscow, Iskusstvo, 1963-1970. 66. ]
[5] See Ibidem, p. 64.
[6] “Consciousness: from the Latin “to be aware”: in the sense of self-awareness and awareness of the external world in as far as both are psychic functions in which every conscious experience of the subject is summed up. Therefore: to be aware or rather to act and to know with regards to oneself and the world.» R. Daniele, Il dramma della Coscienza, essay, booklet of the cd Aisthànomai, il dramma della Coscienza.
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May 25th, 2010 at 10:12 pm
Mind the bardos.
May 25th, 2010 at 10:17 pm
And because it’s too easy, unmind, mine, un-mine, undermine, remind the bardos.
Intuitive stuff, but interesting (maybe I’m missing something in the translation, of course I am).
Can’t wait to hear this text full-sail with inspiration, coughs, hiccups and elusive tongueries.
May 26th, 2010 at 5:22 am
Right. It IS worth saying that to get this post, you MUST listen to the music. And I am not sure that something is missing in the translation–I think Daniele’s writing is just supremely dense and continental, and that’s how she likes it. There’s a lot of mystery there.
May 26th, 2010 at 11:35 am
This is the only not-perfunctory music column on the Internet except for William Bowers’s Puritan Blister column at Pitchfork Music, and this is my favorite installment yet. Thank you for adventuring on our behalf, and for exegeting, and for doing consumer advocacy of the most honorable variety alongside the criticism.
May 26th, 2010 at 12:04 pm
Yep, will listen to the music. The writing strikes me as academic.
But then, most interviews with artists, especially musicians, are disappointing. Music speaks for itself, or not, as the case may be.
May 26th, 2010 at 12:51 pm
That said, I’m all for mystery, organic and earned.
May 27th, 2010 at 7:40 am
romina daniele should stick to discussing her own work, not the work of galas, which is influenced by a huge amount of music that has nothing to do with europe, whatseover. galas has had to come to terms with european influence, or some such nonsense….QUESTION MARK
Namely the amanes of Anatolia. THIS IS ASIA MINOR AND BEYOND. It is very suspicious that she now claims to have been working in the same way as diamanda galas before she ever heard of her when it was galas herself who praised her for her humility,after meeting her, since she praised galas nonstop for two days for her great influence upon her.
it is obvious looking at her, her discussion of artaud of pasolini, that you could be reading an interview with galas in 1980.
why do people rewrite history–
it is not necessary.
the truth is always a better idea is a quote by galas herself, in reference to the genocides….but is this not the same as trying to pretend that a great influence was NOT pardon my english
May 27th, 2010 at 11:41 am
Romina Daniele talks deeply about her own work and she is not questioning Galas influence and her greatness, that is out of question of course, as it is clear in the first question of Moody indeed.
Furthermore, I was there at “Stratos Prize” in Faenza, Italy, in 2005 – and the recordings of this event exist – when Romina was remarking during her speech, with Galas sitting closely, the greatness of Diamanda Galas and Demetrio Stratos works, in the field of vocal research and in that of arts, as in her own artistic growth.
It doesn’t seem that she is saying “to work in the same way of Galas before she met her”, because firstly, she doesn’t work in the same way; and secondly, as we can read in the first answer, she didn’t know Galas at the first time of her research, which means, about 2000. And who can question this? And, on the basis of which documents/sources?
Besides, does “Tony Vega” – who was posting – know the Stratos opera and the history of vocality from the half of the nineteenth century until today? Does he know the music, its history, and the relations between Europe an America?
Then, Artaud and Pasolini (both completely European) are two of the many and even most important cultural references in this interview, from which it is clear an absolute unique universe, very strong, by a person who lives art philosophically and put in it all of her, all her studies and all her strength.
Furthermore, defending a certain way of thinking and being, and fighting against “unconscious human being” (and something that I cannot even introduce here in a few words); and countless discussion topics are arising from her own work, if you can see them.
And some other discussions should be left to the critics, who do this work because they have the necessary knowledge to do so.
May 27th, 2010 at 2:47 pm
Everyone can have a say, it’s the web. Unless comments are blocked or censored, we’re all here making a big unholy mess of things.
Underinformed people can blahdy blahdy (hello! I know nothing of music theory). More informed people might be generous enough to correct or teach those of us who have much to learn.
I’d also venture to say that, sometimes, out of the mouths of babes …
Other times it’s likely wise to just listen.
This column has been engaging since its inception. Moody seems to adventure and labor hard — with an open mind, passion, discrimination and enthusiasm –in order to share fresh musics with us.
May 28th, 2010 at 11:59 am
I just wanna notice that Daniele’s also and first of all a writer, of books and essays and especially poems, this writing activity is a big part of her musical work as well. That’s why she answers in a certain way, that’s the same way we can find in her lyrics and so called theoretical lines. I was at the last concert she had in Milan and I can say she’s the interpreter of her own poems in a way I never heard before. Her research in a field of textuality, of poetry, of linguistic modes to say her thoughts is something more than musical, than we are used to.. You perceive a research, something moving, across several lines, of course difficult, hard to say and explain.. but moving.. and extremely fascinating. One other thing I wanted to say is about a kind of sensuality, sweetness and vulnerability you can really perceive under a rough exterior, which is the most unexpected and appreciated characteristic of her vocality too, in the concerts as in the records.
May 28th, 2010 at 6:00 pm
I’m really glad that Italians are weighing in here, people who have seen Daniele perform, and that they are doing so in English too! Let’s say that despite the hard work done here to make this into uniform English there are probably some translation issues, and perhaps these are being exacerbated a little bit in the comment section. Just a guess. I am willing to guarantee, in even the short time that I have corresponded with Daniele, that she was not saying she was doing what Galas did before she heard Galas. I think maybe she was saying that she came by extended vocal technique in a relatively untutored way, at least initially. However, since I wrote this piece, I have had an opportunity to learn more about Demetrio Stratos, and I think Daniele is telling the truth about his influence on her, and that influence is very credible in Italy, where Stratos was HUGE. Americans who are reading deep into this post and the comments should check out what little of Stratos they can get there hands on here. It’s bizarre, amazing work.