Daniela Pes - The sound of words

Hello Daniela, first of all congratulations from the OndaRock editorial team: we were really eager to exchange a few words with you, following your excellent debut album “Spira” (Tanca Records, 2023), which sparked plenty of enthusiastic praise in our group.

Thank you so much. That really pleases me. Your judgment truly impressed me, also because, I've noticed, you're not usually ones to hand out over-the-top praise easily.

Are you surprised by the great response your work has received right from the start? While making the album, did you start to sense you were creating an artistic product clearly above average?

I'm very surprised by the response. I didn't expect it to be such an accessible record, one that could be so well absorbed by fans of different age groups, coming from different musical cultures and different languages. What I'm noticing is that the album is appreciated not only by discerning music connoisseurs with a certain kind of background, but also by people usually drawn to other genres, far from what I imagined would be my initial target audience. I'm also surprised to see how many people are following me. Getting 200,000 Spotify streams in a month, selling out my first shows — honestly, I didn't expect that, especially for a record like this.

While writing the record, I had the feeling, without a doubt, of being part of something precious, regardless of the outcome — especially for myself. I knew I had something important in my hands for my own path. Clearly, over these three long years of gestation, I asked myself several times: "How will it turn out? I don't know!" The fact that I had carried out such a deconstructed piece of work on language, even more than the one built around musical experimentation, raised a lot of questions for me about how it would be received.

So the choice to use an imaginary language for your lyrics — one you invented by blending terms from the Gallurese dialect with Italian and Latin — was a fixed point of the project, something you intended and planned in advance from the start?

Yes, but it wasn't decided at a desk. I came from a long period in which I set poems to music. Setting poems to music means writing and adapting your musical ideas, like melodic lines for instance, fitting them into a pre-established, obligatory textual meter. At a certain point along the way, this situation turned out to be an obstacle, a limitation, both for my musical ideas and for the melodies I had in my head, so I decided to abandon the scheme imposed by having to force a fixed text to fit and having to necessarily convey a concept. I therefore devoted myself entirely to the search for sonic harmony, to the creation of phonemes, words, roots, that would give me maximum freedom in writing the musical part. Once I understood how to get around this structural barrier, which I found too coercive for what I had in mind, I started working on "Spira", in a very instinctive way, following a great creative flow, a flow of taste. I never asked myself whether this strategy was right or wrong, I never questioned anything. I used words suited to joining music and text together, according to my own very personal logic.

So basically you're confirming that the lyrics have no visible meaning; that was something I wondered from the very start, listening to the tracks on "Spira".

The work I did in writing the lyrics was, always and only, aimed at finding words with the most fitting sound, with no search for meaning whatsoever. Then, here and there, I found that the sound of certain words with an actual meaning was perfect, always starting from the concept of assonance, of sonic shape, and so I fit them in among the others. Obviously, the presence of Italian words invites listeners to pin down precise thoughts, as may have happened, for example, in "Carme", in the line "...figura colma sia..." — they do exist, that's true, but they're jagged fragments, set amid other things that mean nothing. In no track, as in the whole record, is there a specific concept, a meaning. Every track means, to me, the exact same thing.

We'd like to get to know Daniela Pes better. It's always a difficult question, sometimes even a trivial one, but in many cases, when you ask an artist to talk about themselves, unexpected, surprising facets emerge...

If I had to answer you off the cuff, I'd tell you that I don't know who Daniela Pes is (she smiles), or rather, I don't like defining myself. I'd rather have others give me feedback, look for something in what I do that struck them, something that sets me apart. I understand, though, that your question was really aimed more in an autobiographical direction, to which I'd answer, let's see, that I'm a composer, a musician, a singer, even though I'm not especially fond of that last label.

I have some recordings dating back to when I was four years old. My first recorded track was "Se ti tagliassero a pezzetti" by Fabrizio De André, and then I remember recording, a year or two later, I don't quite remember, "Giudizi universali" by Samuele Bersani. Having been born into a family of musicians – my father is a musician, my mother is an avid listener of music, my siblings are all musicians – helped a great deal with my entry into this world. Music has always been a constant in our family. Whenever I sat down at the piano, my father would record everything. I have a huge amount of material that I sometimes listen back to, through which I revisit wonderful memories and very intense moments.

As for the history of listening that shaped my artistic growth, I'd say it was mainly rooted in the singer-songwriter tradition: De André, Bersani, as I said, Francesco De Gregori, Ivano Fossati, Ivan Graziani, Lucio Dalla, Lucio Battisti, the whole elite school, the eternal one, which wrote indelible pages of Italian music. I've built up a long experience within jazz. I listen to a lot of instrumental music. I particularly love Israeli and Armenian music, in general music from that part of the world, which helped me, together with jazz as I said, both in my approach to writing music and in finding the right destination for the sound of my voice.

Basically, it might be precisely this perfect absorption of the patterns of the Italian singer-songwriter tradition that explains why your record, despite being marked by complex electronic, instrumental, and above all textual experimentation, immediately struck a chord with so many listeners:

Why not. It could be that this excursus of mine, being so deeply my own, came out this way, with these particular traits. In fact, I've had the chance to see that even people and artists working at a high level in mainstream pop have picked up on the right vibrations coming from my record, and listen to it. I'm absolutely aware that "Spira" is a decidedly complex record. Behind it lies a huge amount of work in writing, production, arrangement, and that's exactly why I'm still so particularly amazed by the immediate response it's gotten.

You said that "Spira" took you three years to record. Among the figures who contributed to shaping the album is Iosonouncane. How did the collaboration with Jacopo and his Tanca Records come about?

Before setting out to write the new material, I stopped for a moment, because I couldn't figure out what was blocking the expression of my true intentions. I could sense the presence of something, which obviously I couldn't pin down clearly, that was undermining my artistic process in writing the songs. Through a mutual friend, I asked for a contact with Jacopo, whom I had never met and with whom I'd never had any previous contact. I thought of him because he's without a doubt my favorite contemporary artist, and I thought that only someone like him, at his level, could unlock my creative impasse. I wrote him an email describing all my unease, what I was going through, and I took the opportunity to send him a few tracks. Jacopo's reply was so detailed that it made me feel completely understood, especially because it confirmed all my doubts, capturing the situation perfectly.

At that point, without replying to his email, I waited two weeks and decided to write a brand new track from scratch. I felt it would be reductive to give a simple reply to someone who had understood my situation so deeply, urging me to keep going while also pointing out a few things that hadn't fully convinced him either. The tracks I'd initially sent to Jacopo were completely shelved, and my work started over again entirely from the beginning.

The new track I sent Jacopo was "A te sola", which was indeed kept and included on the record. After listening to the track, Jacopo confirmed that this was the right path to follow, that compared to all the material I'd sent him before and everything of mine he'd had the chance to hear, this finally reflected something important, something I absolutely had to dig deeper into. It was he, at that point, who gave me free rein to send him any other composition of mine. And that's what I did, for three years, at the end of which we started talking about the record — but before that, I spent all that time writing nonstop, sharing everything I produced: a great deal of dialogue, a great deal of exchange, about everything, always by email.

After a year of what you might call an epistolary relationship, we finally met in Bologna to start properly planning the making of the album. Every track I created was then passed through Jacopo's wonderful arsenal of sounds. All the synthesizers that define his sound are clearly recognizable across the seven tracks of "Spira".

If we were to place this creative process on a timeline, your artistic partnership was therefore born during the writing of "Ira"?

Exactly. He was writing "Ira", material which, incidentally, I never got to hear in advance. Jacopo never let anything slip about that record, which I knew he was writing, precisely because he didn't want to influence my personal artistic development in any way.

The first track you released, among those later included on "Spira", was "Carme", accompanied by a truly evocative video.

Yes, the footage of my face was shot by Piera Masala, a photographer who's also Sardinian, and who also took all the photos connected to the "Spira" project. With Piera we also shot a lot of footage in a quarry located in the municipality of Monteleone Rocca Doria (the second-smallest municipality in Sardinia), which we then sent to Alessandro Gagliardo, the video's director, who together with Olimpia Pierucci edited it alongside archival images and footage that suited the context particularly well.

Daniela, we've repeatedly stressed throughout this interview the sheer beauty and refined uniqueness that "Spira" radiates. As its creator, is there anything you'd change today - tracks you might have added, ones left in a drawer, or that you'd revisit with some variation?

Far be it from me to call "Spira" a perfect record, also because I don't think the perfect record exists. I have to admit I'm genuinely satisfied with the result. The meticulous work done with Jacopo, which lasted three incredibly intense years full of technical sessions, combined with the meticulousness that's absolutely part of my nature - and on this we were perfectly in sync - led to the album taking the shape it has now: an extremely carefully crafted work, with no deadlines imposed on us, taking all the time needed for every detail to come together in the best possible way. I'd say that today I wouldn't change anything about the finished work. Just think, I must have around thirty different versions of "A te sola" alone, which shows just how much effort went into perfecting it.

As for any extra tracks, no, I'd say not. I believe this is the right tracklist. I don't think adding other tracks, sections or transitions that remained unreleased would add any more value to the record as a whole, even though I admit I have a huge amount of unreleased material on hand.

Even though this is a record you really need to enjoy in full, start to finish, let's play a little game together. Out of the seven tracks on the album, I've personally picked four. From this quartet, help me choose my favorite, obviously giving me some extra insight that nobody could offer better than you: the first is "A te sola":

That's a rather macabre game you're proposing (laughs). Look, if I really had to choose, I'd say "A te sola" captures pretty much the entire essence of the work done for "Spira". Besides being the first track sent to Jacopo - excluding the initial ones that were later shelved - it also represents the first important building block of what would then develop over the following years. In "A te sola" there's a first part, raw and bare, stripped down, with just my voice and guitar; then there's a second part that's very much tied to my world, the world of vocal arrangement, harmonies, voicing, the sound of the voices, harmonization: I absolutely love working with voices. Then there's a third part, which flows into this mantric, almost liturgical, repeated ritual, which is something very dear to me. I love cyclicality, repetition, and working with voices. I think, both musically and vocally, "A te sola" is absolutely the synthesis of the whole album - there's so much packed into that track.

Moving on to the other two choices: "Arca" and "Ca mira" - the latter, in particular, reminded me very closely of the Eastern-tinged atmospheres of Battiato's "On the Strings of Aries":

I agree. "Ca mira" is a track that, to me, is synonymous with home, which is exactly why it was chosen as the opener. The interplay between minor and major mode draws heavily on Sardinian tradition. The voice, in this particular case, plays across everything, singing over a drone with no fixed mode, and since it's built on a diatonic scale between the first and fifth degree - without the third, the note that determines the mode, the character of the scale, which I create with my voice - all of this ties back to the music of my homeland.

The last track chosen is "Carme", a moment that dropped me into a fairy-tale, shifting, iridescent setting:

I split "Carme" into two sections: one more stripped-down, a bit like "A te sola", since it too grew out of a guitar arpeggio, then run through a Juno synthesizer, which flows into a coda rich with variations - it's a bit of a two-sided track, with an A-side and a B-side. But again, I find it hard to analyze the individual tracks in a way that isn't, as you've seen, fairly technical, with the exception of "A te sola", since it was the first track. Every composition went through countless variations, many versions. This approach to writing gave me a lot of freedom, because it set no limits on me - you don't have to follow the verse, chorus, pre-chorus structure and so on. The downside is that, without a predetermined guide, it's hard to choose which path to take among the many you've set in motion, so a great deal of energy went into figuring out, for each track and even within a single track, the right path to follow for every section.

Sardinia is certainly among the Italian regions that, in recent years, has produced a striking number of innovative musical artists: you, Iosonouncane, Alek Hidell, and Vieri Cervelli Montel himself, born in Florence but thoroughly Sardinian by adoption, and the great Paolo Angeli. What do you make of that?

It's true. Now that I think about it with you, I do notice that Sardinia has been putting forward some very identity-driven ideas lately. Some people have even asked me if our land is such a determining factor. I believe it is. Coming from a land so rich in history, tradition, culture, legends, obscure figures, so many distinct colours and flavours, and the fact of being an island, gives you feelings that are probably stronger than what goes on around you elsewhere. These are all things that inevitably shape our path, not just artistically.

My album, for instance, I wrote entirely in Sardinia during the lockdown period, when the region was emptied of everything and everyone. The landscapes, which are already fairly desert-like, had taken on an even more spectral, and therefore highly evocative, appearance.

Your album came out on vinyl (which sold out immediately) and on digital platforms. Was it a deliberate choice not to offer direct HQ download, especially for an album that would arguably be significantly enhanced by that kind of format?

Unfortunately I can't answer that. It's available on Spotify and on the other similar platforms too. I wouldn't want to give you wrong information regarding digital download distribution. As for the vinyl, we hope it can be repressed as soon as possible, but again I don't have any firm news on that. The one thing we're sure of is that we never expected such an immediate response, even in physical sales.

Last question. What are your plans for the future, both immediate and longer-term?

Right now I'm 100% focused on the live dimension. I'm trying to bring the album to life in concerts that I try to shape as carefully as possible. I'm currently performing as a duo with a wonderful Sicilian electronic music artist called Maru. I hadn't performed live for three years, and I missed it terribly, since I really feel like a stage musician, and now I'm fully enjoying these big occasions. I also think the live dimension is very useful for pointing you towards new possible directions. I think concerts are essential for artistic growth. Also, in the live sets, I leave a lot of room for improvisation. I bring the album's tracklist, which I try to reproduce as faithfully as possible, but obviously there are stretches of improvisation built in, which I've kept firmly in place, because I consider them necessary. The first dates were all sold-out, and it was wonderful to feel the audience's energy and the attention they showed.

Daniela, thank you again for this interview, congratulations once more on your excellent debut, and a warm greeting from me and the whole OndaRock team.

Thank you all. Greetings to everyone, and I'll see you at my shows.

(11/06/2023)

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