Alessandra Eramo is an artist who works with voice and noise. Mostly known for her “Solo for Voice and Electronics”, she creates performance pieces, text-sound compositions, site-specific installations, audiovisual works and drawings exploring latent acoustic territories of the human voice and trance-like states in singing, pushing the boundaries of sound poetry. In 2017 she’s invited artist at the 6th Thessaloniki Biennale of Contemporary Art to show “Migratory Echoes”, her installation/performance based on interviews to migrants about the sounds of their “Home”.
Co-founder of “Corvo Records – vinyl & sound art production” where she released the 7″ “Roars Bangs Booms” based on her performance work presented at the Museum FLUXUS+ in Potsdam about the onomatopoeic words from the Futurist Manifesto “The Art of Noises” by Luigi Russolo. She will perform “The Anonymous Song“ with Polish composer Zorka Wollny at Acud Macht Neu on 19th January for the opening of Vorspiel CTM Festival.
FACTS:
1: German music institutions, listeners and makers: please stop to define E- Musik and U-Musik, it’s a boring and conservative way of communicating.
2: South is North if you turn the map upside down
3: A lot of people nowadays are falling in new forms of nationalism and patriotism. I don’t care about nations. I find nationalism poor and narrowminded, I do care for cultures.
QUESTIONS:
1. What is the biggest inspiration for your music?
The noises of everyday life and languages I don’t understand.
2. How and when did you get into making music?
I started to sing when I was a child. My favourite place to sing was the staircase in the entrance hall of my house, because it created a nice reverb. I was trained in singing, piano/ keyboard and music theory. I composed my first poem/song when I was nine years old. My father, who was a singer/songwriter in an Italian Beat band, helped me composing the music for my song. As a teenager I was listening to a lot of music and all kind of genres like blues, jazz, rock, metal, avant-garde, classical and world music. I was very lucky as there were many music lovers all around me in those years in Taranto. So I took part to numerous bands as singer, chorister and e-bass player. When I was 18 years old I moved to Milan to study at the Brera Fine Arts Academy. In these years I got involved in Performance Art, Intermedia and Fluxus, which inspired me to renegotiate my music understanding and production in strong connection with visual art. This intermedial approach is very important for my artistic production.
3. What are 5 of your favourite albums of all time?
Impermanence – Meredith Monk
Piano Music – John Cage
200 Motels – Frank Zappa
Nabelóse – Elena Kakaliagou & Ingrid Schmoliner
Musica Futurista – Luigi Russolo
4. What do you associate with Berlin?
A grey and solemn sky.
The reverb of tiny noises in a courtyard between buildings – like a solitary crow’s cawing, the voices of children playing, the “ding ding” of a bycicle –
The revolutionary revenge of proletarians through their schnauzen.
The freedom to be what you wish to be.
5. What’s your favourite place in your town?
My bed
6. If there was no music in the world, what would you do instead?
Writing poems on my bed
7. What was the last record/music you bought?
“Mario der Eismann und der Pinguin” an audio drama for my 2-year old daughter
8. Who would you most like to collaborate with?
I would like to sing Neapolitan songs with Mike Patton
9. What was your best gig (as performer or spectator)?
As spectator: Gilles Aubry “And Who Sees The Mystery” for the Corvo Records Release Party in December 2017
As performer: “Solo for voice and electronics” at Radial System for the Heroines of Sound Festival 2017
10. How important is technology to your creative process?
I mostly use and control modern technology as tool for creation, not the otherway round.
11. Do you have siblings and how do they feel about your career/art?
I have a sister who is an educator and musictherapist. She is quite interested in my art too, especially she appreciates my courage in having a career with my art.
To listen: soundcloud.com/ezramo/solo-for-voice-and-electronics
