Language becoming sound again. The sound becoming utopia.
Produced by IOSONOUNCANE, Spira, the first album by singer, instrumentalist and electronic musician Daniela Pes – already winner in 2017 of the prestigious Andrea Parodi award, Nuovoimaie awards (2017 and 2018) and SIAE best music within Musicultura – is released on April 14. Preceded by the single Carme, the record is released on the Tanca Records label on vinyl and all digital platforms.

Between elegant and obscure electronica with sometimes galloping beats and ambient with cosmic breath, seven tracks wrapped in the singing of an artist with multifaceted talent, devoted to the deconstruction of the song form and the deconstruction of language to create an esoteric sound world in which the archaic, the contemporary and the futuristic envelop each other as in the gravitational dance of two galaxies about to merge.
Class of 1992, born in Gallura, a jazz background behind her that allows her absolute compositional freedom, among the peculiarities that make Daniela Pes an atypical personality compared to the current scene is definitely the use of the voice as an instrument and the work on the textual dimension: in Spira, the Sardinian artist sings in fact in a language that does not exist (yet). Ancient Gallurese words, fragments of Italian terms, totally invented vocabularies are the organic molecules of an unprecedented language in which verses are disengaged from metrics and words are not vehicles of a concept, but pure sound, like grains of an articulated phonetic rosary, inaccessible from a rational point of view but intoxicating from an emotional point of view.
Lunar and mysterious, Daniela Pes thus accesses the primordial dimension of language to define a new archetype of communication. As enigmatic as a Greek oracle, she transports us to the meanders of an initiation, leaving us dominated by her fascination with the magical aspects of music. Composed on guitar, piano and Ableton software over three years – a period of time in which a deep and constant confrontation with IOSONOUNCANE developed – the seven tracks of Spira develop as sonic streams rather than as songs and seem to draw the music of a shamanic ritual celebrated in a remote and hallucinated future to evoke new chthonic deities. A music as familiar in its vocal melodic lines rooted in tradition and, at the same time, as alienating as the landscapes populated by wild masks depicted in Charles Fréger’s photographs. And if the instrumental dimension seems to evoke cinematic images, the vocal one brings Daniela Pes closer to the linguistic-expressive research of certain contemporary theater.

Spira is a record of visionary music that interprets sound drama as utopia. And utopia is nothing but a model constructed to practice a radical critique of the existing. We are thus faced with a reckless and, in an anthropological sense, regal artist who, through her music, projects us elsewhere only to allow us glimpses of the reality of our present, where the logos appears (perhaps irretrievably) compromised.
This is Daniela Pes.