InSound Magazine (April 2008)
A definitive feature essay in InSound Magazine codifying the radical musicological manifesto and fierce creative independence behind the self-published masterwork Aisthànomai.
RDM Records Archive
4/18/20082 min read
Published shortly after the historic self-directed launch of her second masterpiece, this definitive feature essay by Claudia Galal for InSound Magazine traces the unyielding conceptual foundations of Aisthànomai: The Tragedy of Consciousness.
The text permanently codifies Romina Daniele’s radical musicological manifesto into the specialized press, framing the album as an uncompromising continuation of her 2005 international Demetrio Stratos Prize-winning research. Galal examines how Aisthànomai completely rejects conventional song structures, analyzing the voice not as a simple commercial instrument, but as an autonomous, multi-disciplinary 'action-process' intersecting live electronic manipulation, avant-garde theater, cinema theory, and raw instinct. This milestone feature stands as a powerful testament to the absolute creative independence and intellectual authority upon which the RDM Records catalog was built.
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Headline: ROMINA DANIELE: TO PERCEIVE CONSCIOUSNESS On page 16, the article by Claudia Galal:
"To confine her research to a specific discipline would be misleading, as well as reductive. At the end of last year, she completed her second album for voice and electronics, Aisthànomai: The Drama of Consciousness, which was recently released. This work follows the previous Diffrazioni Sonore (2005), a sort of exploration of vocal potentials, for which she obtained the Demetrio Stratos International Prize for Musical Experimentation (New Projects section).
Aisthànomai collects the work and study of two years, during which Romina faced with curiosity and intellectual courage the impervious territories of poetry, musical and vocal experimentation, theater, and visual arts, making use of her own preparation both in the musical and in that of the history and methodology of art, aesthetics, and of cinema theories.
The voice is not used simply as an instrument, because the voice, as Romina herself wrote to accompany Diffrazioni Sonore, does not want to sound like an instrument: 'it has no synonyms or means, it is act-action-process: being there, being, presence, consciousness' while 'the musical instrument is a means, an intermediary'. In this case, 'the electronic one is the medium used as a context for his very particular vocality. Only in this way,' Romina continues, 'can the voice extract itself from the stale misleading discourse that relegates it to the conservative conception of music today and from the concept of the now worn-out, old, instrumentality.'
