Daniela Pes - Spira (Tanca, 2023)

Fist came, as far as I can remember, Dead Can Dance, with Lisa Gerrard and her invented, dark but also dreamy language, that also a psychologist with an attention for the Occult like Carl Gustav Jung could admire. Then, it was the time for Sigur Ròs and their vonlenska / hopelandic, also know as “the language of hope”. Who can’t remember the beauty of songs as Hjartað hamast(bamm bamm bamm), also present in movies such as Immortal Ad Vitam by Enki Bilal in a scene where the glorious Linda Hardy starts understanding what she as a human being is?

Not to mention, for those who come from my own country, Italy, a musician like Fabrizio de André who, in an album like Creuza de mä (Ricordi, 1984), sang in a mix of slang from Genova, arabic language and invented words over a texture of music played with ethnic and also invented instruments. That was, in the words of Mauro Pagani, musician and producer who worked on that record, like to give life to a “dream music”, more than to an album of world music in the proper sense, and with Spira (Tanca, 2023) by Daniela Pes, an album of electronic and experimental sounds, we’re basically on the same ground.

Daniela Pes, born in Sardinia, Italy, in 1992, has a degree in jazz singing taken at the Sassari Conservatory, and studied subsequently under the direction of Paolo Fresu, one of the most recognized and acclaimed jazz musicians in my country. Thanks to those studies she exhibited in Rio De Janeiro at the Harp Festival. After some important prizes, Pes started developing her own vision, that is, and this album is great to give every listener a proper idea, a little bit different from every previous music output.

Sardinia is a great land for music and contamination. I think about Paolo Angeli and his Sardinian prepared guitar, that is a step into the tradition and at the same time a step into the avant-garde. Daniela Pes music is in the same groove, so to speak. After a period in which she gave life to music for poems, she found out composing music this way was too limiting for her, and so she created a language of her own with fragments of words from the slang from Gallura, the part of Sardinia she comes from, Italian and Latin languages where meaning is less important than the feeling itself.

The result is an evocative music, where electronic instruments fuse with acoustic guitars and gentle, small percussions. Not less important, the record was produced by Iosonouncane – whose real name is Jacopo Incani – another musician coming from Daniela Pes birthplace whose music is well known in my country and whose productions, along with his original material, are highly praised. Jacopo contributed with a couple of songs as co-writer and with arrangements, synthesizers and other instruments, even if Daniela Pes is mostly responsible for the sounds and the production herself.

Someone wrote that sometimes Pes music can be related to the experimental albums of Franco Battiato. If that means a mix of songrwriting and far out, unusual sounds and structures, they’re right, but don’t exspect higlhly distorted sounds or alarm sirens-like sounds or those kind of dissonances: Pes music is an intimate and intimistic experience for people who want to collect themselves into their own instinct, just to use Pes words, and feelings above all.

Ca Mira, the opening track on the album, begins with a voice melody that seems to come from Carnatic or Middle East music – but in an interview Pes stated that she loves music from Israel, Armenia and that region of the world in general, along with Italian songwriters such as Ivano Fossati, Francesco De Gregori and Lucio Battisti – accompanied with a drone, but that after a couple of minutes evolves into an open space of electronic heartbeats welcomed by a rain of small percussions, where voice and electronic instruments give life to a proper sonic landscape in crescendo. After, some vocal glitches accompany a nice vocal melody.

Illa Sera is possibly the best choice for a radio broadcast in order to present the album: there are verses and choruses, along with loops embellishing Pes exquisite vocal performance. Pes voice througout the entire album is sometimes raucous but always subdued to a certain meditative mood. Key to Carme is, instead, minimalism, the minimalism that caractherizes some of the best productions by Laurie Anderson just to name one, but with an openly emotional quality instead of the NY artist attempt to create some Brechtian estrangement.

The short Ora is a track in the name of a murmured text and some sounds that made me recall to my mind some productions by Tom Waits like What’s He Building, but if David Lynch’s movies sound design works better for you as a reference, this sounds good too. There’s also space for an organ drool that dramatizes the feeling of the song. Làira is, instead, an heartbroken melody interspersed with dense beats, one of the most rhythmic tracks of the album that at a certain point opens to a beautiful and childish melody in the choruses.

Arca is almost an experimental version of a gospel lullaby, with his guitar melodies that preludes to the more than ten minutes long closing track A Te Sola, a piece of only acoustic guitar, electronics and voice but for the final slightly noisy and subliminal part that is the perfect ending for an highly emotional album. And if you’re curious enough as me to see if live Daniela Pes is as enchanting and coherent as in studio, I’ll leave you with this video taken from a concert here below. Ah, I was just forgetting: this album was one of the best record issued in Italy last year as far as many reviews and reviewers.